tention even from those who incline to a different solution.

29. WHAT IS REAL TIME?--From the thin air of such speculations as we have
been discussing let us come back to the world of the plain man, the world
in which we all habitually live. It is from this that we must start out
upon all our journeys, and it is good to come back to it from time to
time to make sure of our bearings.

We have seen (Chapter V) that we distinguish between the real and the
apparent, and that we recognize as the real world the objects revealed to
the sense of touch. These objects stand to each other in certain
relations of arrangement; that is to say, they exist in space. And just
as we may distinguish between the object as it appears and the object as
it is, so we may distinguish between apparent space and real space,
_i.e._ between the relations of arrangement, actual and possible, which
obtain among the parts of the object as it appears, and those which
obtain among the parts of the object as it really is.

But our experience does not present us only with objects in space
relations; it presents us with a succession of changes in those objects.
And if we will reason about those changes as we have reasoned about space
relations, many of our difficulties regarding the nature of time may, as
it seems, be made to disappear.

Thus we may recognize that we are directly conscious of duration, of
succession, and may yet hold that this crude and immediate experience of
duration is not what we mean by real time. Every one distinguishes
between apparent time and real time now and then. We all know that a
sermon may _seem _long and not _be_ long; that the ten years that we live
over in a dream are not ten real years; that the swallowing of certain
drugs may be followed by the illusion of the lapse of vast spaces of
time, when really very little time has elapsed. What is this _real_ time?

It is nothing else than the order of the changes which take place or may
take place in real things. In the last chapter I spoke of space as the
"form" of the real world; it would be better to call it _a_ "form" of the
real world, and to give the same name also to time.

It is very clear that, when we inquire concerning the real time of any
occurrence, or ask how long a series of such lasted, we always look for
our answer to something that has happened in the external world. The
passage of a star over the meridian, the position of the sun above the
horiz