er long intervals, and so to bring together widely
remote events.

In addition to this general error, there are more special errors. As in
the case of recollection, vividness of mental image suggests
propinquity; and accordingly, all vivid anticipations, to whatever cause
the vividness may be owing, whether to powerful suggestion on the part
of external objects, to verbal suggestion, or to spontaneous imagination
and feeling, are apt to represent their objects as too near.

It follows that an event intensely longed for, in so far as the
imagination is busy in representing it, will seem to approach the
present. At the same time, as we have seen, an event much longed for
commonly appears to be a great while coming, the explanation being that
there is a continually renewed contradiction between anticipation and
perception. The self-adjustment of the mind in the attitude of
expectant attention proves again and again to be vain and futile, and it
is this fact which brings home to it the slowness of the sequences of
perceived fact, as compared with the rapidity of the sequences of
imagination.

When speaking of the retrospective estimate of time, I observed that the
apparent distance of an event depends on our representation of the
intervening time-segment. And the same remark applies to the prospective
estimate. Thus, an occurrence which we expect to happen next week will
seem specially near if we know little or nothing of the contents of the
intervening space, for in this case the imagination does not project the
experience behind a number of other distinctly represented events.

Finally, it is to be remarked that the prospective appreciation of any
duration will tend to err relatively by way of excess, where the time is
exceptionally filled out with clearly expected and deeply interesting
experiences. To the imagination of the child, a holiday, filled with new
experiences, appears to be boundless.

Thus far I have assumed that the date of the future event is a matter
which might be known. It is, however, obvious, from the very nature of
knowledge with respect to the future, that we may sometimes be certain
of a thing happening to us without knowing with any degree of
definiteness when it will happen. In the case of these temporally
undefined expectations, the law already expounded holds good that all
vividness of representation tends to lend the things represented an
appearance of approaching events. On the other hand