174 SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 



at rest when it occupies a space equal to itself, and what 

 is in flight at any given moment always occupies a space 

 equal to itself, it cannot move." 



But according to Prantl, the literal translation of the 

 unemended text of Aristotle's statement of the argu- 

 ment is as follows : " If everything, when it is behaving 

 in a uniform manner, is continually either moving or 

 at rest, but what is moving is always in the now, then 

 the moving arrow is motionless/' This form of the 

 argument brings out its force more clearly than Burnet's 

 paraphrase. 



Here, if not in the first two arguments, the view that 

 a finite part of time consists of a finite series of successive 

 instants seems to be assumed ; at any rate the plausibility 

 of the argument seems to depend upon supposing that 

 there are consecutive instants. Throughout an instant, 

 it is said, a moving body is where it is : it cannot move 

 during the instant, for that would require that the instant 

 should have parts. Thus, suppose we consider a period 

 consisting of a thousand instants, and suppose the arrow 

 is in flight throughout this period. At each of the 

 thousand instants, the arrow is where it is, though at the 

 next instant it is somewhere else. It is never moving, 

 but in some miraculous way the change of position has to 

 occur between the instants, that is to say, not at any time 

 whatever. This is what M. Bergson calls the cinemato- 

 graphic representation of reality. The more the difficulty 

 is meditated, the more real it becomes. The solution 

 lies in the theory of continuous series : we find it hard 

 to avoid supposing that, when the arrow is in flight, there 

 is a next position occupied at the next moment ; but in 

 fact there is no next position and no next moment, and 

 when once this is imaginatively realised, the difficulty is 

 seen to disappear. 



