CHAPTER V
DOUBTS ABOUT CHANGE
As I watch a sensible object the evidence of variation is often irresistible. This flag is flapping. This flame is dancing. How shall I deny that almost everything, in nature and in fancy, like the Ghost in Hamlet, is here, is there, is gone? Of course I witness these appearances and disappearances. The intuition of change is more direct and more imperious than any other. But belief in change, as I found just now, asserts that before this intuition of change arose the first term of that change had occurred separately. This no intuition of change can prove. The belief is irresistible in animal perception, for reasons which biology can plausibly assign; and it cannot be long suspended in actual thinking; but it may be suspended for a moment theoretically, in the interests of a thorough criticism. The criticism too may prove persuasive. Many solemn if not serious philosophers have actually maintained that this irresistible assertion is false, and that all diversity and change are illusion. In denying time, multiplicity, and motion, their theory has harked back — and it is no mean feat of concentration — almost to the infancy of thought, and reversed the whole life of reason. This mystical retraction of all the beliefs necessary to life, and suspension, almost, of life itself, have been sometimes defended by dialectical arguments, to the effect that change is impossible, because the
