| However, the internal necessity perpetually to be, is inseparably connected with the necessity always to have been, and so the expression may stand as it is. |
| Gigni de nihilo nihil; in nihilum nil posse reverti, * are two propositions which the ancients never parted, and which people nowadays sometimes mistakenly disjoin, because they imagine that the propositions apply to objects as things in themselves, and that the former might be inimical to the dependence (even in respect of its substance also) of the world upon a supreme cause. |
| But this apprehension is entirely needless, for the question in this case is only of phenomena in the sphere of experience, the unity of which never could be possible, if we admitted the possibility that new things (in respect of their substance) should arise. |
| For in that case, we should lose altogether that which alone can represent the unity of time, to wit, the identity of the substratum, as that through which alone all change possesses complete and thorough unity. |
| This permanence is, however, nothing but the manner in which we represent to ourselves the existence of things in the phenomenal world. |
| [*Footnote; Persius, Satirae, iii.83-84.] |
| The determinations of a substance, which are only particular modes of its existence, are called accidents. |
| They are always real, because they concern the existence of substance (negations are only determinations, which express the non-existence of something in the substance). |
| Now, if to this real in the substance we ascribe a particular existence (for example, to motion as an accident of matter), this existence is called inherence, in contradistinction to the existence of substance, which we call subsistence. |
| But hence arise many misconceptions, and it would be a more accurate and just mode of expression to designate the accident only as the mode in which the existence of a substance is positively determined. |
| Meanwhile, by reason of the conditions of the logical exercise of our understanding, it is impossible to avoid separating, as it were, that which in the existence of a substance is subject to change, whilst the substance remains, and regarding it in relation to that which is properly permanent and radical. |
| On this account, this category of substance stands under the title of relation, rather because it is the condition thereof than because it contains in itself any relation. |
| Now, upon this notion of permanence rests the proper notion of the conception change. |
| Origin and extinction are not changes of that which originates or becomes extinct. |
| Change is but a mode of existence, which follows on another mode of existence of the same object; hence all that changes is permanent, and only the condition thereof changes. |
| Now since this mutation affects only determinations, which can have a beginning or an end, we may say, employing an expression which seems somewhat paradoxical; "Only the permanent (substance) is subject to change; the mutable suffers no change, but rather alternation, that is, when certain determinations cease, others begin." |
| Change, when, cannot be perceived by us except in substances, and origin or extinction in an absolute sense, that does not concern merely a determination of the permanent, cannot be a possible perception, for it is this very notion of the permanent which renders possible the representation of a transition from one state into another, and from non-being to being, which, consequently, can be empirically cognized only as alternating determinations of that which is permanent. |
| Grant that a thing absolutely begins to be; we must then have a point of time in which it was not. |
| But how and by what can we fix and determine this point of time, unless by that which already exists? |
| For a void time--preceding--is not an object of perception; but if we connect this beginning with objects which existed previously, and which continue to exist till the object in question in question begins to be, then the latter can only be a determination of the former as the permanent. |
| The same holds good of the notion of extinction, for this presupposes the empirical representation of a time, in which a phenomenon no longer exists. |