terms, the destructibility of force or matter, or the creation of
something out of nothing. This, which when writ large maddens and
kills, writ small is our meat and drink; it attends each minutest
and most impalpable detail of the ceaseless fusion and diffusion in
which change appears to us as consisting, and which we recognise as
growth and decay, or as life and death.

Claude Bernard says, Rien ne nait, rien ne se cree, tout se
continue. La nature ne nous offre le spectacle d'aucune creation,
elle est d'une eternelle continuation; {35a} but surely he is
insisting upon one side of the truth only, to the neglect of another
which is just as real, and just as important; he might have said,
Rien ne se continue, tout nait, tout se cree. La nature ne nous
offre le spectacle d'aucune continuation. Elle est d'une eternelle
creation; for change is no less patent a fact than continuity, and,
indeed, the two stand or fall together. True, discontinuity, where
development is normal, is on a very small scale, but this is only
the difference between looking at distances on a small instead of a
large map; we cannot have even the smallest change without a small
partial corresponding discontinuity; on a small scale--too small,
indeed, for us to cognise--these breaks in continuity, each one of
which must, so far as our understanding goes, rank as a creation,
are as essential a factor of the phenomena we see around us, as is
the other factor that they shall normally be on too small a scale
for us to find it out. Creations, then, there must be, but they
must be so small that practically they are no creations. We must
have a continuity in discontinuity, and a discontinuity in
continuity; that is to say, we can only conceive the help of change
at all by the help of flat contradiction in terms. It comes,
therefore, to this, that if we are to think fluently and