Page:Scepticism and Animal Faith.djvu/44

 idea of it is incoherent or self-contradictory. Such arguments, however, are worthless for a critic of knowledge, because they involve an assumption much grosser than that which they discard. They assume that if a thing is dialectically unintelligible, as change is, or inexpressible in terms other than its own, it cannot be true; whereas, on the contrary, only when dialectic passes its own frontiers and, fortified by a passport countersigned by experience, enters the realm of brute fact, has dialectic itself any claim to truth or any relevance to the facts. Dialectical difficulties, therefore, are irrelevant to valid knowledge, the terms of which are irrational, no less than is their juxtaposition in existence.

The denial of change may rest on more sceptical grounds, and may have a deeper and more tragic character. It may come from insight into the temerity of asserting change. Why, indeed, do men believe in it? Because they see and feel it: but this fact is not denied. They may see and feel all the changes they like: what reason is that for believing that over and above this actual intuition, with the specious change it regards, one state of the universe has given place to another, or different intuitions have existed? You feel you have changed; you feel things changing? Granted. Does this fact help you to feel an earlier state which you do not feel, which is not an integral part of what is now before you, but a state from which you are supposed to have passed into the state in which you now are? If you feel that earlier state now, there is no change involved. That datum, which you now designate as the past, and which exists only in this perspective, is merely a term in your present feeling. It was never anything else. It was never given otherwise than as it is given now, when it is given as past. Therefore, if things are such only as intuition makes them, every suggestion of a past