is false. For if the event now called past was ever actual and in its day a present event, then it is not merely a term in the specious change now given in intuition. Thus the feeling of movement, on which you so trustfully rely, cannot vouch for the reality of movement, I mean, for the existence of an actual past, once present, and not identical with the specious past now falling within the compass of intuition. By a curious fatality, the more you insist on the sense of change the more you hedge yourself in in the changeless and the immediate. There is no avenue to the past or future, there is no room or breath for progressive life, except through faith in the intellect and in the reality of things not seen.
I think that if the sense of change, primordial and continual as it is, were ever pure, this fact that in itself it is changeless would not seem strange or confusing: for evidently the idea of pure change would be always the same, and changeless; it could change only by yielding to the idea of rest or of identity. But in animals of a human complexity the sense of change is never pure; larger terms are recognised and felt to be permanent, and the change is seen to proceed within one of these or the other, without being pervasive, or changing everything in the picture. These are matters of animal sensibility, to be decided empirically — that is, never to be decided at all. Every new animal is free to feel in a new way. The gnat may begin with a sense of flux, like Heraclitus, and only diffidently and sceptically ask himself what it is that is rushing by; and the barnacle may begin, like Parmenides, with a sense of the unshakable foundations of being, and never quite reconcile himself to the thought that reality could ever move from its solid bottom, or exchange one adhesion for another. But, after all, the mind of Heraclitus, seeing nothing but flux, would be as constant a mind as that of
