But it is this latter view which is really unthinkable, as may be illustrated by taking a hypothetical case of a growing adaptation or harmony on the way to the perfection, the interpretation of which is disputed.
It will be admitted that in the stage immediately preceding perfect adaptation the organism is very much alive, and moreover carries on its life with a minimum of friction and a maximum of success. In such a life difficulties would exist only to be overcome, and any process of adapting would be only momentary. Now suppose it to become instantaneous. We are required to believe that in the very moment when the last trace of maladaptation is eliminated, life suddenly and inexplicably ceases, and the organism, which but the moment before had been rejoicing in its might, is with scarce a noticeable change suddenly smitten with metaphysical annihilation! A catastrophe like this could be paralleled by nothing in nature or literature except the tragic fate which overwhelmed Lewis Carroll’s Baker “in the midst of his laughter and glee,” when the Snark he had so successfully chased turned out to be a Boojum, and he “softly and silently vanished away”!
And so the principle of continuity compels us to think the ἀκινησία of perfect adaptation, to which all κινήσεις point, as ζῳὴ καὶ ἐνέργεια, as Aristotle contended.
(c) In the case of Consciousness the same interpretation certainly seems at first sight to involve greater difficulties. For what most impresses us about consciousness is the flux of Becoming, which is the world’s aspiration to Being. Consciousness flows with a fluidity which is quite incapable of precise, and almost of intelligible, statement. It is a perpetual transition from object to object, not one of which it can retain for a fraction of a second, and in which nothing ever occurs twice. To suggest, then, that it may persist, in what would amount to a timeless contemplation of unchanging objects, would seem to be madly flying in the face of all the facts.
Nevertheless, the Aristotelian theory has no need to fly in any one’s face or ever to leave the solid ground of legitimate inference. It has no quarrel with the facts: it only disputes about their interpretation. To infer from the facts the ‘relativity’ of all consciousness and Hobbes’ dictum sentire semper idem et nil sentire ad idem recidunt appears to it either a truism or an error, and in no wise decisive.[1] It is a truism, if it asserts that sensation in time involves change, and that
- ↑ Cf. Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. xii., § 5.
