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.