On Change, Time and Motion

Abstract

The notion of change has been much obscured by the doctrine of substance, by the distinction between a thing’s nature and its external relations, and by the pre-eminence of subject-predicate propositions. It has been supposed that a thing could, in some way, be different and yet the same: that though predicates define a thing, yet it may have different predicates at different times. Hence the distinction of the essential and the accidental, and a number of other useless distinctions, which were (I hope) employed precisely and consciously by the scholastics, but are used vaguely and unconsciously by the moderns. Change, in this metaphysical sense, I do not at all admit. The so-called predicates of a term are mostly derived from relations to other terms; change is due, ultimately, to the fact that many terms have relations to some parts of time which they do not have to others. But every term is eternal, timeless, and immutable; the relations it may have to parts of time are equally immutable. It is merely the fact that different terms are related to different times that makes the difference between what exists at one time and what exists at another. And though a term may cease to exist, it cannot cease to be; it is still an entity, which can be counted as one, and concerning which some propositions are true and others false.