was most obnoxious to the flesh in my radical scepticism. I have found that even when no change is perceived in the image before me, my discourse changes its phases and makes progress in surveying it; so that in discourse I now admit a sphere of events in which real variations are occurring. I may now assert, when I perceive a motion, that this intuition of change is true; that is, that it has actually followed upon the intuition of a static first term, from which my attention has passed to this intuition of change; and this I may now assert without confusing the essences given successively, or trying, like animal perception, to knead one concrete thing out of their incompatible natures. The existence of changing things or events in nature I may still deny or doubt or ignore; in the object I shall, with perfect clearness, see only an essence, and if this happens to be the essence of change, and to present the image of some motion, that theme will seem to me as determinate, as ideal and as unchanging as any other, and as little prone to lapse into any different theme. Any motion seen will be but a fixed image of motion. Actual flux and actual existence will have their appropriate and sufficient seat in my thought; I shall conceive and believe, when I reflect on my rapt contemplations, that I have been ruminating, and passing from one to another; but these objects will be only the several essences, the several images or tunes or stories, each always itself, which my mind picks up or invents or reconsiders.
