4. Proof that its idea is got from reflection on the train of our ideas.
That we have our notion of succession and
duration from this original, viz., from reflection on the train of ideas, which we find to appear one after another in
our own minds, seems plain to me, in that we have no perception of duration but by considering the train of ideas
that take their turns in our understandings. When that succession of ideas ceases, our perception of duration ceases
with it; which every one clearly experiments in himself, whilst he sleeps soundly, whether an hour or a day, a
month or a year; of which duration of things, while he sleeps or thinks not, he has no perception at all, but it is
quite lost to him; and the moment wherein he leaves off to think, till the moment he begins to think again, seems
to him to have no distance. And so I doubt not it would be to a waking man, if it were possible for him to keep
only one idea in his mind, without variation and the succession of others. And we see, that one who fixes his
thoughts very intently on one thing, so as to take but little notice of the succession of ideas that pass in his mind,
whilst he is taken up with that earnest contemplation, lets slip out of his account a good part of that duration, and
thinks that time shorter than it is. But if sleep commonly unites the distant parts of duration, it is because during
that time we have no succession of ideas in our minds. For if a man, during his sleep, dreams, and variety of ideas
make themselves perceptible in his mind one after another, he hath then, during such dreaming, a sense of
duration, and of the length of it. By which it is to me very clear, that men derive their ideas of duration from their
reflections on the train of the ideas they observe to succeed one another in their own understandings; without
which observation they can have no notion of duration, whatever may happen in the world.
