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1. INTRODUCTION
The decades bracketing the end of the nineteenth century saw two colossal developments in the philosophy and psychology of the experience of time. The first was William James' highly influential Principles of Psychology,1 published in 1890; the second was edmund Husserl's Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins,2 based on notes written largely during the first decade of the twentieth century, but first published in 1928. Associated with each of these developments is a standard, largely unchallenged understanding of its historical precursors: 3 James was chiefly synthesizing a good deal of work that had been done over the previous three decades or so in experimental psychology in Germany, primarily under the influence of Wundt, and framed this synthesis in terms of a philosophical idea he credited to "E. R. Clay," namely, the specious present doctrine (henceforth, sP doctrine) Husserl was reacting to, and building on, attempts by Brentano and Meinong to provide analyses of time consciousness, and was also familiar with work in experimental psychology, including James' work, and with the expression 'specious present' that James had used for the doctrine.
But as we shall demonstrate in this paper, the standard picture is crucially incomplete. There is a clearly discernible line of philosophical debate about the temporality of experience which began with Thomas reid, ran through a number of nineteenth-century Anglophone philosophers, and culminated in two independent termini: "E.R. Clay," identified by James as the author of the anonymously published The Alternative: a Study in Psychology; and the work of the now nearly-completely forgotten shadworth Hollway Hodgson. The first goal of this paper is discerning and describing this line of development and its two termini. Both of these termini were significant influences on James. The second goal of this paper is to argue that the second terminus, Hodgson, was also a significant and unappreciated influence on Husserl. sections 2 through 5 discuss, in turn, the relevant doctrines of Thomas reid, dugald stewart, Thomas Brown, and William Hamilton. exposition of these authors establishes that discussion of the temporal character of perceptual experience was already underway prior to James, while tracing how distinct stances on relevant premises concerning consciousness and experience eventually led to the formulation of the sP doctrine. section 6 discusses robert Kelly (alias 'E.R....