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 to $$A$$, then justify, first, your taking $$A$$ without it; and in the next place show how, with such an incongruous nature, $$A$$ can succeed in being more than unreal appearance.

And we may perhaps fancy at this point that a door of exit is opened. How will it be, since the difference is the source of our trouble, if we fall back upon the identity of cause and effect? The same essence of the world, persisting in unchanged self-conservation from moment to moment, and superior to diversity—this is perhaps the solution. Perhaps; but, if so, what has been done with causation? So far as I am able to understand, that consists in the differences and in their sequence in time. Mere identity, however excellent, is emphatically not the relation of cause and effect. Either then once more you must take up the problem of reconciling intelligibly the diversity with the unity, and this problem so far has shown itself intractable. Or you yourself have arrived at the same conclusion with ourselves. You have admitted that cause and effect is irrational appearance, and cannot be reality.

I will add here a difficulty, in itself superfluous, which comes from the continuity of causal change. Its succession, on the one hand, must be absolutely without pause; while, on the other hand, it cannot be so. This dilemma is based upon no new principle, but is a mere application of the insoluble problem of duration. The reader who is not attracted may pass on.

For our perception change is not properly continuous. It cannot be so, since there are durations which do not come to us as such; and however our faculties were improved, there must always be a point at which they would be transcended. On the other hand, to speak of our succession as being properly discrete seems quite as indefensible. It is in fact neither the one nor the other. I presume that