Page:Appearance and Reality (1916).djvu/66

, the whole commits suicide, and destroys them in its death. It would serve no purpose to repeat these inexorable laws. Let us see merely how change condemns itself by entering their sphere.

Something, $$A$$, changes, and therefore it cannot be permanent. On the other hand, if $$A$$ is not permanent, what is it that changes? It will no longer be $$A$$, but something else. In other words, let $$A$$ be free from change in time, and it does not change. But let it contain change, and at once it becomes $$A^1, A^2, A^3$$. Then what becomes of $$A$$, and of its change, for we are left with something else? Again, we may put the problem thus. The diverse states of $$A$$ must exist within one time; and yet they cannot, because they are successive.

Let us first take $$A$$ as timeless, in the sense of out of time. Here the succession of the change must belong to it, or not. In the former case, what is the relation between the succession and $$A$$? If there is none, $$A$$ does not change. If there is any, it forces unintelligibly a diversity onto $$A$$, which is foreign to its nature and incomprehensible. And then this diversity, by itself, will be merely the unsolved problem. If we are not to remove change altogether, then we have, standing in unintelligible relation with the timeless $$A$$, a temporal change which offers us all our old difficulties unreduced.

$$A$$ must be taken as falling within the time-series; and, if so, the question will be whether it has or has not got duration. Either alternative is fatal. If the one time, necessary for change, means a single duration, that is self-contradictory, for no duration is single. The would-be unit falls asunder into endless plurality, in which it disappears. The pieces of duration, each containing a before and an after, are divided against themselves, and become mere relations of the illusory. And the attempt to locate the lapse within relations of the discrete leads to hopeless absurdities. Nor, in any case, could we