specious present the supposed time between past and future. The term was first offered by E. R. Clay in The Alternative: A Study in Psychology (1882), and was cited by James in Chapter XV of his Principles of Psychology (1890). Clay challenges the assumption that the ‘present’ as a ‘datum’ is given as ‘present’ to us in our experience. ‘The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past – a recent past – delusively given as benign time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past that is given as being the past be known as the obvious past.’ For James, this position is supportive of his contention that consciousness is a stream and can be divided into parts only by conceptual addition, i.e., only by our ascribing past, present, and future to what is, in our actual experience, a seamless flow. James holds that the ‘practically cognized present is no knife-edge but a saddleback,’ a sort of ‘ducatum’ which we experience as a whole, and only upon reflective attention do we ‘distinguish its beginning from its end.’ Whereas Clay refers to the datum of the present as ‘delusive,’ one might rather say that it is perpetually elusive, for as we have our experience, now, it is always bathed retrospectively and prospectively. Contrary to common wisdom, no single experience ever is had by our consciousness utterly alone, single and without relations, fore and aft. See also TIME. J.J.M.