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a flux, and an absolute flux, in which nothing was carried over from moment to moment, would yield, in each of these moments, nothing but an intuition of permanence. So far is the actual instability of things, even if I admit it, from involving a sense of it, or excluding a sense of its opposite. I may, therefore, occasionally deny it; and nothing can persuade me, during those moments, that my insight then is not truer than at other times, when I perceive and believe in change. The mystic must confess that he spends most of his life in the teeming valleys of illusion: but he may still maintain that truth and reality are disclosed to him only on those almost inaccessible mountain tops, where only the One and Changeless is visible. That the believer in nature perceives that this mystical conviction is itself a natural event, and a very ticklish and unstable illusion, does not alter that conviction while it lasts, nor enter into its deliverance: so that under its sway the mystic may disallow all change and multiplicity, either virtually by forgetting it, or actually by demonstrating it to be false and impossible. Being without irrational expectation (and all expectation is irrational) and without belief in memory (which is a sort of expectation reversed), he will lack altogether that sagacity which makes the animal believe in latent events and latent substances, on which his eventual action might operate; and his dialectic not being rebuked by any contrary buffets of experience, he will prove to his heart’s content that change is unthinkable. For if discrete altogether, without a continuous substance or medium, events will not follow one another, but each will simply exist absolutely; and if a substance or medium be posited, no relation can be conceived to obtain between it and the events said to diversify it: for in so far as the substance or medium permeates the events nothing will happen or change; and in so far