Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/115

Rh mental condition of knowability, which, as we have seen, is nothing other than "being."

Nor does the idea of "not-being" help us out, for in all changes nothing is really lost. We simply have different impressions, one after the other. There is no reason to think that something has been annihilated merely because my sensations change from moment to moment while my attention is fixed on a given point in space, any more than there is reason to think that something has been annihilated merely because I receive different impressions from moment to moment when looking through a window of a moving train.

The only difference is that in the case of concepts we may turn back and see again just what we saw before—which we cannot do in the case of time. But the fact that you can't buy return tickets in time is no reason for believing that annihilation has taken place. Chemistry, moreover, offers us plenty of cases in which the union of elements produces a substance which differs from any one of the component elements, and will yield those elements again through analysis.

The concept of "becoming" is then an element of the concept of "being," and is not something which transcends that concept by uniting to it the concept of "not-being." And if, as I believe, the concept of "being" is the only "universal" concept, then philosophy is in a sorry plight in-