The second, which depends on abstraction alone, gives time in general, the pure concept, which cannot be represented, and is determined by signs alone.
First Stage.—Certain minds never get beyond this first stage. In respect of time, this corresponds to the lower forms of abstraction which we have so often designated by the terms, generic image and, at a higher degree, concrete-abstract notions (intermediate abstracts).
The lowest form, which is just higher than the recognition of concrete duration, results like the generic image from the repetition of a sequence of events that recur constantly, and are approximately uniform. They are series of which the terms are variable, but which begin and end always in the same manner. Such are the appearance and disappearance of the sun, lying down to sleep and waking up again, and similar facts of common life. The points of departure, the start and finish, are always the same, whatever the variations in the intermediate states. These generic images are met with among the higher brutes, children, and primitive races.
To what extent are the higher animals capable of having a certain representation of time, constructed from their experience of real duration? This is an obscure problem which has been little studied. We are not of course referring to time in abstracto, to the concept, but to the recognition of certain often repeated cycles. Many animals are known to have an approximate appreciation of sufficiently protracted periods, supplied by the periodicity of their needs (hours at which they get food, are taken out, etc., etc.). Prejudice apart, we know of others which, in addition to this subjective physiological knowledge, possess a fairly exact notion of certain regular and objectively caused periods, determined by the progress of natural phenomena, especially by the path of the sun.[114]
In all these instances we may assign as cause, the incontestable preponderance (in animal life) of automatism and of routine: which is equivalent to saying that the notion of these durations is formed by a passive assimilation, and this—as we have seen—is the creative process of generic images.
According to some authors, there are instances of exact appreciation of much less simple periods. Brehm says that during a long passage an ourang-outang visited the sailors every Wednesday and Friday at 8 o’clock, because on those days sago, sugar, and cinnamon were served out, of which he got his share. An anecdote has often been cited after Romanes, of “the geese who came regularly every fortnight, from afar, the morning after the market, in a small English town, to pick up the corn scattered on the marketplace. One year the market was postponed for a day of national humiliation, but the geese came as usual.”[115]
These and other analogous facts seem scarcely sufficient in number, nor strictly enough observed, to warrant any scientific conclusion.
We have previously remarked that, up to the age of three years or more, children who already have an approximate knowledge of space relations, (distance, proximity, within, without, upper, lower, etc.) have a very confused notion of periods as short as three to four days, a week, etc. It has been hypothetically suggested that the extension of the notion of duration must for them arise in expectation rather than in memory, in an orientation towards the future rather than the past.
The concrete-abstract period with its different degrees, limited on the one extreme by generic images, on the other by the pure concept, is met with among savage races, and in rising civilisations. It is a stage that has to be traversed by every human race; many now existing have not got beyond it. Days (solar revolution), months (lunar revolution), and seasons, the round of the changing aspects of nature, give the primitive and simplest notions of time in extension. No tribe is so low in the scale as not to have reached this level. The determination of the (solar) year, even when only approximate, marks a decisive progress.