Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/478

 again, then, we have a superseding of the kinds of change as explained above.

(2) When in the course of time a strange land becomes home to the exile, when heathen peoples gradually accustom themselves to the new Christian faith brought to them by missionaries, when the discovery—at first so strange—that the sun stands still and the earth moves round it is at last accepted as natural and certain, in all such cases we have an acquisition of E-values, which depends upon the acquisition of a kind of change which originally signified a variation of work, and now becomes a familiar exercise of work. Here we have no kind of superseding, but a mere acceptance.

(3) For the Eleatics the universe, in so far as it is variable, was “illusion,” while in so far as it is invariable they called it the only “real” and “exclusive Being,” and this depends upon the same substitution of kinds of change as when an individual begins to regard variable matters and events, the joys and sorrows of this world, as “empty show” and “vain trifling,” while a religious “ideal,” a life after death, seems to him the only “true” “eternal” life. In both cases we have a substitution of interests directed towards a “permanent,” which is dependent upon a substitution of kinds of change. We may refer the following instances to the same gradual formation of a constantly functioning kind of change: the longing of the Buddhists for Nirvana, Plato’s Eros for absolute being, the longing for salvation of the earlier Christians, Spinoza’s Amor erga rem aeternam et infinitam, the naturalist’s search for generic concepts and natural laws.

Does not all evolution of science follow the scheme of these three groups of endosystematic adjustments of the system C? All these manifestations of human thought-activity, widely different as they are, all these E-values, are referred by Avenarius with the greatest ingenuity and acuteness to the vital-series and their course; in other words, he shows their dependence upon these. Nay, he even goes further and says: If the E-values ultimately depend (directly) upon the changes of system C, then we must also be able to find groups of E-values which depend upon the particular characteristics of the changes.

This he does in analogy with the fact of acoustics that, in talking of sound-notes, particular statements correspond to quite definite characteristics of one and the same external motor-process. Thus, e.g., a statement as to its strength depends only upon the amplitude of the oscillations, a statement as to its pitch depends upon the number of