216 HUMANISM xn 



Now suppose it to become instantaneous. We are 

 required to believe that in the very instant when the last 

 trace of maladaptation is eliminated, life suddenly and 

 inexplicably ceases, and the organism, which but the 

 moment before had been rejoicing in its might, is, with 

 scarce a noticeable change, suddenly smitten with meta 

 physical annihilation ! 



Is not this incredible ? Could a catastrophe like this 

 be paralleled by anything in nature or literature except 

 the tragic fate which overwhelmed Lewis Carroll s Baker 

 &quot; in the midst of his laughter and glee,&quot; when the Snark 

 he had so successfully chased turned out to be a Boojum, 

 and he &quot; softly and silently vanished away &quot; ? And so, 

 does not the principle of continuity compel us to think 

 the drcivrjaria of perfect adaptation, to which all Kivr/areis 

 point, as life and activity (&&amp;gt;?) KOL evepyeia), as Aristotle has 

 contended. 



(V) To Consciousness it seems at first harder to apply 

 this same interpretation. For what most impresses us 

 about consciousness is the flux of Becoming, which is the 

 world s aspiration to Being. Consciousness flows with a 

 fluidity which is quite incapable of precise, and almost 

 of intelligible, statement. It is a perpetual transition 

 from object to object, not one of which it can retain for a 

 fraction of a second, and in which nothing ever occurs 

 twice. To suggest, then, that it may persist, in an 

 eternal fixation of unchanging objects, would seem to be 

 the very acme of insanity. 



Nevertheless, the Aristotelian theory here also has no 

 quarrel with the facts : it only contends for their better 

 and more logical interpretation. To infer from the facts 

 the relativity of all consciousness and Hobbes dictum 

 sentire semper idem et nil sentire ad idem recidunt, appears 

 to it either a truism or an error, and in no wise decisive. 1 

 It is a truism, if it asserts that sensation in time involves 

 change, and that all our experience is in time. It is an 

 error, if it is taken as the starting-point of an argument 

 which either proposes to conduct us out of consciousness 



1 Cp. Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. xii. 5. 



