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 idea of it is incoherent or self-contradictory. Such arguments, however, are worthless for a critic of knowledge, because they involve an assumption much grosser than that which they discard. They assume that if a thing is dialectically unintelligible, as change is, or inexpressible in terms other than its own, it cannot be true; whereas, on the contrary, only when dialectic passes its own frontiers and, fortified by a passport countersigned by experience, enters the realm of brute fact, has dialectic itself any claim to truth or any relevance to the facts. Dialectical difficulties, therefore, are irrelevant to valid knowledge, the terms of which are irrational, no less than is their juxtaposition in existence.
The denial of change may rest on more sceptical grounds, and may have a deeper and more tragic character. It may come from insight into the temerity of asserting change. Why, indeed, do men believe in it? Because they see and feel it: but this fact is not denied. They may see and feel all the changes they like: what reason is that for believing that over and above this actual intuition, with the specious change it regards, one state of the universe has given place to another, or different intuitions have existed? You feel you have changed; you feel things changing? Granted. Does this fact help you to feel an earlier state which you do not feel, which is not an integral part of what is now before you, but a state from which you are supposed to have passed into the state in which you now are? If you feel that earlier state now, there is no change involved. That datum, which you now designate as the past, and which exists only in this perspective, is merely a term in your present feeling. It was never anything else. It was never given otherwise than as it is given now, when it is given as past. Therefore, if things are such only as intuition makes them, every suggestion of a past 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 Parmenides, seeing nothing but rest; and if the philosophy of Heraclitus were the only one in the world, there would be no change in the world of philosophy.
Accordingly, when I have removed the instinctive belief in an environment beyond the given scene, and in a past and future beyond the specious present, the lapse in this specious present itself and the sensible events within it lose all the urgency of actual motions. They become pictures of motions and ideas of events: I no longer seem to live in a changing world, but an illusion of change seems to play idly before me, and to be contained in my changelessness. This pictured change is a particular quality of being, as is pain or a sustained note, not a passage from one quality of being to another, since the part called earlier never disappears and the part called later is given from the first. Events, and the reality of change they involve, may therefore be always illusions. The sceptic can ultimately penetrate to the vision of a reality from which they should be excluded. All he need do, in order to attain to this immunity from illusion, is to extirpate from his own nature every vestige of anxiety, not to regret nor to fear nor to attempt anything. If he can accomplish this he has exorcised belief in change.
Moreover, the animal compulsion to believe in change may not only be erroneous, but it may not operate at all times. I may remain alive, and be actually changing, and yet this change in me, remaining unabated, may be undiscerned. Very quick complete changes, cutting up existence into discrete instants, the inner order of which would not be transmitted from one to the other, would presumably exclude memory. There would be no intuition of change, and therefore not even a possible belief in it. A certain actual persistence is requisite to perceive 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 as the events really occur and are not merely specious changes given in one intuition, they will be discrete altogether, without foothold in that medium or substance postulated in vain to sustain them. Thus the mystic, on the wings of a free dialectic, will be wafted home to his ancient and comforting assurance that all is One, that Being is, and that Non-Being is not.