Chapter 11
Change, motion and becoming; growth and decay; permanence versus flux.
366 passages · 129 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Change is the most familiar of facts and among the hardest to think through. Under this idea fall motion and becoming, growth and decay, generation and corruption, the passing of feelings and fortunes, the alteration of states and languages, the rising and sinking of continents, and the conversion of one substance or force into another. It is a great idea for the Harvard Classics because nearly every kind of book in the set meets it. The Stoic meditates on it in order to die well. The saint uses it to measure the creature against the Creator. The statesman must decide whether to resist it or to guide it. The geologist reads its record in rock, and the chemist watches it in a candle flame. Behind all these lies one question, which the Greeks posed and the nineteenth century reopened: whether anything abides through change, and if so, what.
The boldest answer is that nothing does. Marcus Aurelius returns again and again to the thought that substance is like a river in continual flow, that hardly anything stands still, and that the universe itself is transformation1,2,3. Things hurry into existence and out of it, and the earth changes like successive waves4,5. Even his own body is not what his mother bore, since its matter is renewed from food and air6. Yet his flux is not chaos. Nature loves to change things and to make new ones like them, so that whatever exists is in a manner the seed of what will be7. In this way the world is kept ever new, and, as his editor George Long puts it, the whole stays ever young while its parts dissolve8,9,10. Augustine sees the same procession of passing parts. He adds that we would delight more in the whole if we could perceive it all at once, and that in speech, at least, we wish the parts to pass so that the whole may be heard11. Among the moderns the theme is often darker. Bacon holds that matter is in perpetual flux and that novelty is only forgetfulness, with deluges and earthquakes burying all memory12. Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea sees a world dissolving toward chaos as friends part and possessions change13. Emerson, by contrast, finds the flux exhilarating: nature abhors the old, and only transition and the energizing spirit are secure14,15.
A second strand finds order in change by making it circular. In the Phaedo, Plato argues that all generation proceeds from opposites, waxing from waning and heating from cooling. If the process did not return upon itself, all things would end in one state and generation would cease16,17,18. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes draws the gloomier conclusion that sun, wind and rivers circle endlessly and that there is nothing new under the sun19. Marcus agrees that things come round in a circle20, and Montaigne reads the seasons as a mirror of the world’s ages, all things cycling and yet remaining the same21. Bacon’s essay on vicissitude extends the cycle to human affairs, and he judges the greatest change among men to be the change of sects and religions22. Shelley’s Cloud gives the cycle its happiest image: it changes form but cannot die, and it rises again after rain like a child from the womb23. Darwin, standing on Ascension, still saw on every spot the signs of an endless cycle of change24.
Cyclical change preserves kinds. Metamorphosis transforms them. In Dante’s Hell, man and serpent melt into one another and exchange features, speech and substance25,26. Emerson’s poet perceives in every creature a force driving it to ascend into a higher form, and he takes the changes of wheat and caterpillars as hints that forms are not immutable27,28. The more common experience of change is the round of growth and decay. Augustine states it as the law of created things: they rise, grow, wither and pass away, hastening toward not-being even as they come to be29. Marcus insists that the unripe grape, the ripe bunch and the raisin are changes into something not yet existing, not changes into nothing30. Hugo has everything pass through youth, manhood and old age31. Taine has each stage born of the death of the one before, as fruit comes of the flower32. Pasteur brings the same rhythm under the microscope, recording the progressive alteration of cells as they age33.
From these observations arises the philosophical question of how the permanent and the changing are related. Schiller gives the sharpest statement. Man contains a person, which persists, and a condition, which changes. The permanent cannot be derived from the changeable, and the opening and fading of a flower presuppose something that endures through both34,35. Each requires the other, for change presupposes permanence and permanence implies change36. Burke applies a similar thought to the commonwealth, which he describes as a permanent body made of transitory parts, in perpetual decay and renovation37. Emerson inverts the image: society is a wave that moves while its particles do not38. The Buddhist doctrine of Dependent Origination refuses both horns, steering a middle course between the persistence and the annihilation of existences39. Plato locates permanence elsewhere, in essences that remain the same while composite things change and dissolve40,41. Berkeley turns the contrast against the materialist. Since our ideas change with distance and with the state of our organs, while real things are supposed fixed, ideas cannot resemble them42.
The religious authors place absolute permanence in God. Augustine prefers the unchangeable to the changeable and the incorruptible to the corruptible. He holds that God changes His works without changing His purpose, and that souls, being mutable, would pass away unless established in Him43,44,45. Thomas à Kempis contrasts men, who change like the wind, with Christ, who remains forever46,47. The Bhagavad-Gita sets the realm of flesh, where all things change, against an unchanging higher Life48. Raleigh explains how an unchangeable cause can produce a temporal effect without alteration in itself49, and Berkeley’s Hylas presses the old difficulty that a new act of will would mean change in the Deity, and all change argues imperfection50. Browning’s assurance that earth changes while soul and God endure51 is answered by Emerson, who denies that there are any fixtures in nature. Permanence, he says, is a word of degrees, and forms are fugitive though substances survive52,53,54.
How, then, should a mortal regard change? The Stoics answer that it is natural and therefore no evil. Epictetus calls reaping, leaf-fall and death changes within an ordered economy, not destruction55. Marcus argues that to fear change is unreasonable, since nothing useful, not even a bath or a meal, happens without it56. He adds that loss is only change, in which universal nature delights, and that the parts of the whole must perish so that the whole may be renewed57,58. The Buddhist writings draw a different lesson from the same premise. Because everything born and organized must perish, and separation from what is dear belongs to the nature of things, one should not identify the self with transitory sensations or cling to wife, child or gold59,60,61,62. Kempis counsels the same detachment from earthly things63. The Stoic accepts change as the work of a good nature; the Buddhist and the Christian treat transitoriness as a reason to turn away from the world.
Change within the self is felt most keenly in love. Cicero observes that changes of character through misfortune and age break friendships64. Pascal says love fades because the lovers change, for our nature consists in motion and complete rest is death65. Hobbes gives a physiological reason: the body is in continual mutation, so the same things cannot always cause the same appetites66. Burns offers nature’s mighty law of change as an excuse for fickleness67, while Keats mourns a change that no one heals68. Yet change of self can also be gain. Wordsworth finds recompense for the lost raptures of youth69. Emerson asks the soul to shed its old system of things as a shellfish leaves its shell, warning that it will do so in shocks if it resists70,71, and Holmes’s creature likewise leaves each outgrown chamber72. Walton dwells on Donne’s youthful motto, How much shall I be changed, set against his deathlike final aspect73,74. Machiavelli notes that men are undone when times change and they do not75.
Societies change as persons do. Dante likens Florence to a sick woman shifting on her bed, and in Paradise he reflects that families and cities wane as fortune turns like the moon’s tides76,77. Goethe’s Alva argues that no constitution can remain unchanged78. Carlyle sees governments succeed one another like phantasms, and he holds that the death of a society is a new birth79. Whether such change is to be welcomed divides the authors. Machiavelli calls innovation the most dangerous of undertakings, because the beneficiaries of the old order oppose it and its supporters are lukewarm80. Bacon makes time the greatest innovator and bids reformers imitate it, proceeding quietly and by degrees81. Burke’s position has two sides. A state without the means of change lacks the means of its conservation82, yet change that alters substance must be distinguished from reformation, and to innovate is not to reform83,84. Carlyle calls change painful but needful, and he holds that nothing worthy in the past dies85,86. Tennyson’s Arthur declares that the old order changeth lest one good custom corrupt the world87, and elsewhere the poet asks for change that is free and firm, neither swift nor slow, joined by gradation88,89.
Language and fashion show the same mutability on a smaller scale. Caxton thinks Englishmen live under the wavering moon, like their speech90. Johnson, who would have preferred constancy, concedes that languages are as subject to decay as life, irresistible as the tides91,92. Hugo says words vanish as ages change, since the sun does not stand still93. Emerson finds that fashions too obey a law of gradation94. Most vivid of all is Dana returning to California after twenty-four years. The cove is filled in, the hide trade is gone, the missions have decayed, and almost nothing recalls the old times95,96,97.
In the scientific works, change becomes a matter of measurable history. Virgil and Harrison record land torn from land or devoured by the sea98,99. Lyell describes the slow upheaval and subsidence of whole countries100. Darwin finds shells nearly fourteen thousand feet up, concludes that nothing is so unstable as the level of the earth’s crust, and explains coral atolls by slow subsidence101,102,103,104. Geikie narrates Europe’s successive submergences and foldings, with the Alps rising like earth-waves105,106. The question here is the old one of reform against innovation in a new form: gradual change against sudden. Lyell argues that uniform, continuous causes can produce the breaks once taken for catastrophes107,108. Darwin holds that the Cordillera was slowly upheaved rather than thrown up, and that species change only by short, slow steps109,110. He also notes how slow our minds are to admit great changes whose steps we cannot see111. Still, he can speak of great convulsions112, and Lyell allows local alternations of disturbance and repose113. The living creation, on Lyell’s view, is itself in continual flux114. Darwin traces migrations driven by glacial cold115 and the remaking of St. Helena’s vegetation after goats were introduced116.
Against this, the fables raise the ancient question whether a nature can really be changed. Aesop’s cat, turned into a maiden, still pounces on a mouse117. Homer’s Proteus runs through lion, water and tree, then resumes his own shape118, and the transformations of the Arabian Nights and Grimm are enchantments that are finally undone119,120. Pasteur, in the laboratory, denies that yeast is transformed into another species121. Faraday shows water passing through Protean changes of ice, liquid and steam while remaining the same substance, so that nothing turns water into any other thing122,123. Even when he decomposes water into gases, he recovers the water from them124. Helmholtz finds that work alters its form of manifestation without being lost or increased125, and he observes that glacier ice itself flows126. Hobbes holds that motion persists until something checks it127, and Emerson names motion and rest, change and identity, as the first secrets of nature128.
The conversation thus ends near where it began. Marcus’s ever-young whole, Schiller’s abiding person, Augustine’s unchanging God, Faraday’s constant water and Helmholtz’s conserved work are all answers to the one demand that change have something to change in. Whether that abiding thing is a substance, a law, a self or a deity, and whether permanence is anything more than slower change, as Emerson suspected, these books leave open.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
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