Page:Scepticism and Animal Faith.djvu/41

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of anything else, so that this appearance will stand in my philosophy as the only reality. But, then, I must not enlarge nor interpret nor hypostatise it: I must keep it as the mere picture it is, and revert to solipsism of the present moment. One thing is the feeling that something is happening, an intuition which finds what it finds and cannot be made to find anything else. Another thing is the belef that what is found is a report or description of events that have happened already, in such a manner that the earlier phases of the flux I am aware of existed first, before the later phases and without them; whereas in my intuition now the earlier phases are merely the first part of the given whole, exist only together with the later phases, and are earlier only in a perspective, not in a flux of successive events. Ifanything had an actual beginning, that first phase must have occurred out of relation to the subsequent phases which had not yet arisen, and only became manifest in the sequel: as the Old Testament, if really earlier than the New Testament, must have existed alone first, when it could not be called old. If it had existed only in the Christian Bible, under that perspective which renders and calls it old, it would be old only speciously and for Christian intuition, and all revelation would have been really simultaneous. In a word, specious change is not actual change. The unity of apperception which yields the sense of change renders change specious, by relating the terms and directions of change together in a single perspective, as respectively receding, passing, or arriving. In so uniting and viewing these terms, intuition of change excludes actual change in the given object. If change has been actual, it must have been prior to, and independent of, the intuition of that change.

Doubtless, as a matter of fact, this intuition of change is itself lapsing, and yielding its place in