Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/176

Rh two are one and the same, inasmuch as the end of one change is always the beginning of another, just as the beginning of one change is always the end of another. There can be thus no absolute beginning and no absolute end, for every beginning is the end of something else, and every end is the beginning of something else. The variation in the temperature of the day, or of the seasons, may afford another illustration of the conception of Becoming. The temperature is never, I believe, even for the shortest instant, exactly the same; and the reason why it seems to us to be sometimes invariable is, because our feelings and our instruments are not sufficiently fine to measure its incessant and continuous changes. But perhaps the whole phenomena of growth and decay furnish the best examples in illustration of the Heraclitean conception of Becoming. Growth is a continual change. The growing creature, whether animal or vegetable, is continually becoming different from what it is. The process never stops—never stops in such a way as to enable us to say, now the animal or the vegetable is, and has ceased to become. It never truly is, inasmuch as its state is never fixed and permanent. It is always passing on into another state, in which there is no rest or pause any more than there was to the preceding one. We might suppose the oak, the monarch of the woods, to grow up from an acorn into a stately tree, and to go to decay, and all this to take place before our eyes in a few minutes, and the process would not truly be more