ly and reading one book
at a time, beginning at the beginning and taking each page and each
word in succession, and a lifetime would not suffice to enable us to
read them all; whereas, if our knowledge were _complete_, the word
representing the contents of that room would start an instantaneous
thought, comprising not only every book, but every chapter, page,
word, letter, and punctuation contained in that library, or in one
which comprised all knowledge from the beginning to the end of Time.

It is a well-known fact that at the approach of death, when the
perceptive senses are completely, or almost completely, in abeyance,
as in the "self-forgetting" referred to in "The Vision," the duration
of Time appears to have no reality; in numerous cases of drowning,
where the person has been no more than one or two minutes under water,
the whole of a long life, with every forgotten trivial occurrence and
the multitude of thoughts attached thereto, have been brought vividly
before the mind, as it were, instantaneously; those also who have been
put under nitrous-oxide gas, though the life of the body is not
affected, know how, with departure of sense perception, the sense of
Time is completely annihilated. I have myself experimented under such
conditions, and attempted to realise the duration of time by counting
steadily, one, two, three, four, &c., and had no knowledge whatever
that between, say, "four" and "five" there was a complete hiatus of
several minutes when, for me, time had vanished; I was still counting
steadily when the anaesthetic had passed away, and it was quite
impossible to realise that such time had elapsed, as I had not reached
more than the twelfth count, whereas, according to the time expired, I
should have reached the fiftieth or sixtieth. A number of examples of
what may be called instantaneous thoughts created in the mind of a
sleeper have been collected, and many of us have had similar
experiences. I give one as an example: "Maury was ill in bed and
dreamed of the French Revolution. Bloody scenes passed before him. He
held long conversations with Robespierre, Marat, and other monsters of
that time, was dragged before the tribunal, was condemned to death,
and carried through a great crowd of people, bound to a plank. The
guillotine severed his head from his shoulders. He woke with terror to
find that a rail over the bed had got unfastened and had fallen upon
his neck like a guillotine, and, as his mother w