78 SCEPTICISM. 



but the modes of their interaction, or to state the 

 matter with still fewer assumptions, phases we ascribe 

 to the same substance. But this permanent identity 

 of things from moment to moment, this hypothesis 

 of a substantial substratum persisting through change, 

 is a grave assumption. How do we know that 

 successive appearances are changes of the same 

 substance ? It is, after all, an inference that the dog 

 who comes into my room is the same dog who left 

 me five minutes ago, and not, as mediaeval scholars 

 would have considered probable, a demon with 

 intent to tempt me. 



And if, with Kant, we urge against this denial of 

 Substance, that change implies permanence, it is 

 equally easy to answer, with Mr. Balfour, that Kant 

 himself admitted the possibility oi alternation, i.e. of 

 a kaleidoscopic wavering of appearances, in which 

 the sole connection between the successive phases 

 was a fiction of our minds. 



§ 13. Our highest and most abstract categories 

 also, those of Being and Becoming, fare no better at 

 the sceptic's hands. For while it soon appears that 

 in nature nothing is\ but everything becomes, Becom- 

 ing turns out to be a contradiction in terms, merely 

 a word to designate a forcibly effected union of 

 Being and Not-Being. For when we say that a 

 thing becomes, we can describe it only by the two 

 ends of the process, positively by what it is and 

 negatively by what it is not. Thus the hatching of a 

 chicken is defined by the ^gg which it is, but will 

 not be, and the chicken, which it is not, but will be. ^ 

 Becoming, therefore, is not properly a category of 

 our thought, but a fact which we symbolize by the 

 word ; and that which we try to express by it appears 

 as the unknowable, the incomprehensible by thought, 



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