Throughout Locke’s discussion we find such tension between a reliance on abstractions for measuring time and a lingering commitment to sensation. On the one hand, Locke points out the arbitrariness of our conventions. “Minutes, Hours, Days, and Years,” he reminds us, “are then no more necessary to Time or Duration, than Inches, Feet, Yards, and Miles, marked out in any Matter, are to Extension” (191). On the other hand, he privileges those conventions that seem as though they are verified by direct sensory evidence. Thus, for example, he prefers the temporal estimations of a blind man who can smell, taste, and feel seasonal change over those generated by calendars:
Thus we see that Men born blind, count Time well enough by Years, whose Revolutions yet they cannot distinguish by Motions, that they perceive not: And I ask, whether a blind Man, who distinguished his Years, either by heat of Summer, or cold of Winter; by the Smell of any Flower of the Spring, or taste of any Fruit of the Autumn, would not have a better measure of Time, than the Romans had before the Reformation of their Calendar by Julius Cæsar, or many other People, whose Years, notwithstanding the motion of the Sun, which they pretend to make use of, are very irregular: and it adds no small difficulty to Chronology, that the exact lengths of the Years that several Nations counted by, are hard to be known, they differing very much one from another, and, I think, I may say all of them, from the precise motion of the Sun. (189)
And yet, the heat of air, the blossoming of flowers, and the ripeness of fruit are no less “irregular” than “the motion of the Sun” that underwrites the old Roman calendar, which Locke here criticizes. What drives Locke’s privileging of the blind man’s temporal estimations in this passage is the sheer sensual abundance of his description. That the blind man relies on three senses that connect his estimations of the passage of time to nature’s seasons suggests to Locke that he can “count Time well enough”—even better than those whose estimations of the sun’s motions in their calendars turn out to be faulty. The fewer mediating apparatuses between our perceptions of the external world and our temporal estimations of length, Locke indicates, the more reliable our estimations of time will be.
That Locke prefers notions of time passing that more directly arise from sensation becomes even clearer as he proceeds to discuss the measures afforded by the new technology of pendulum clocks.7 He writes:
Though Men have of late made use of a Pendulum, as a more steady and regular Motion, than that of the Sun or (to speak more truly) of the Earth; yet if any one should be asked how he certainly knows, that the two successive swings of a Pendulum are equal, it would be very hard to satisfie himself, that they are infallibly so: since we cannot be sure, that the Cause of that Motion which is unknown to us, shall always operate equally; and we are sure, that the Medium in which the Pendulum moves, is not constantly the same: either of which varying, may alter the Equality of such Periods, and thereby destroy the certainty and exactness of the measure by Motion, as well as any other Periods of other Appearances, the Notion of Duration still remaining clear, though our measures of it cannot any of them be demonstrated to be exact. (190)
It is especially striking that Locke should emphasize the unreliability of a pendulum in ordinary conditions of experience immediately after privileging the blind man’s sensual estimations of time passing. The majority of the passage points out that in most circumstances a pendulum will not deliver to our senses an idea of regular motion. For this reason, Locke concludes, temporal measures that rely on a pendulum cannot “be demonstrated to be exact.” And yet, he continues to insist, “the Notion of Duration still remain[s] clear”—as though our sensual experiences of day and night, heat, and ripening fruit, have already settled everything we might want to know about the passage of time. The tracking of seasonal change mediated only by the personal senses seems to him more reliable than any knowledge mediated by technologies whose workings many of us cannot directly observe or understand. This, Locke indicates, makes measures not only imprecise but also experientially suspicious. What Locke less than fully acknowledges here, but that arises indirectly and yet persistently from his discussion, is that the experiential confidence that we have about duration might be best described as feelings of intensities—of temperature, of fragrance, of sweetness.
I am suggesting that Locke’s privileging of firsthand sensual experience in his discussions of the various ways in which our succession of ideas supports conventions for assessing temporal length indicates a dimension of time that his concern for and vocabulary of counting eludes. If sensual experience lends certainty to our sense of duration where abstract measures cannot, then the certainty it furnishes is one that assesses qualities more than quantities—one that gauges feelings and intensities rather than the counting of expanses. Such qualitative dimensions of our sense of duration become even more apparent when we closely examine Locke’s discussion of durations that our sensory apparatuses are not calibrated to perceive. He points out that a succession of moving objects may happen at speeds that are either too fast or too slow for us to notice. The express purpose of the section is to argue that our primary sense of duration arises from the internal succession of ideas, rather than from our registering of external moving objects. But as Locke presents an example, he turns to redefining the instant in such a way that incorporates it as a part of time even as its extensity cannot be measured.
Here is what Locke has to say about the situation of being shot—his example of succession too fast for us to register cognitively:
Let a Cannon-Bullet pass through a Room, and in its way take with it any Limb, or fleshy Parts of a Man; ’tis as clear as any Demonstration can be, that it must strike successively the two sides of the Room: ’Tis also evident, that it must touch one part of the Flesh first, and another after; and so in Succession: And yet I believe, no Body, who ever felt the pain of such a shot, or heard the blow against the two distant Walls, could perceive any Succession, either in the pain, or sound of so swift a stroke. Such a part of Duration as this, wherein we perceive no Succession, is that which we may call an Instant; and is that which takes up the time of only one Idea in our Minds, without the Succession of another, wherein therefore we perceive no Succession at all. (185)
Locke’s assertion that “no Body, who ever felt the pain of such a shot, or heard the blow against the two distant Walls, could perceive any Succession, either in the pain, or sound of so swift a stroke” serves a crucial double purpose here. On the one hand, Locke argues that without the perception of succession such an instance can only yield an instant—“that which takes up the time of only one Idea