Page:Scepticism and Animal Faith.djvu/46

 Parmenides, seeing nothing but rest; and if the philosophy of Heraclitus were the only one in the world, there would be no change in the world of philosophy.

Accordingly, when I have removed the instinctive belief in an environment beyond the given scene, and in a past and future beyond the specious present, the lapse in this specious present itself and the sensible events within it lose all the urgency of actual motions. They become pictures of motions and ideas of events: I no longer seem to live in a changing world, but an illusion of change seems to play idly before me, and to be contained in my changelessness. This pictured change is a particular quality of being, as is pain or a sustained note, not a passage from one quality of being to another, since the part called earlier never disappears and the part called later is given from the first. Events, and the reality of change they involve, may therefore be always illusions. The sceptic can ultimately penetrate to the vision of a reality from which they should be excluded. All he need do, in order to attain to this immunity from illusion, is to extirpate from his own nature every vestige of anxiety, not to regret nor to fear nor to attempt anything. If he can accomplish this he has exorcised belief in change.

Moreover, the animal compulsion to believe in change may not only be erroneous, but it may not operate at all times. I may remain alive, and be actually changing, and yet this change in me, remaining unabated, may be undiscerned. Very quick complete changes, cutting up existence into discrete instants, the inner order of which would not be transmitted from one to the other, would presumably exclude memory. There would be no intuition of change, and therefore not even a possible belief in it. A certain actual persistence is requisite to perceive