Tme doth transfix the flourish set on youth, And delves the parallels in beauty's brow, Feeds on
the rarities of nature's truth, And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
They generally add that their own verses are indestructible:
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand, Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
But this is only a conventional literary conceit.
Philosophically inclined mystics, unable to deny that whatever is in time is transitory, have
invented a conception of eternity as not persistence through endless time, but existence outside the
whole temporal process. Eternal life, according to some theologians, for example, Dean Inge, does
not mean existence throughout every moment of future time, but a mode of being wholly
independent of time, in which there is no before and after, and therefore no logical possibility of
change. This view has been poetically expressed by Vaughan:
I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was
bright; And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years, Driven by the spheres Like a vast
shadow moved; in which the world And all her train were hurled.
Several of the most famous systems of philosophy have tried to state this conception in sober
prose, as expressing what reason, patiently pursued, will ultimately compel us to believe.
Heraclitus himself, for all his belief in change, allowed something everlasting. The conception of
eternity (as opposed to endless duration), which comes from Parmenides, is not to be found in
Heraclitus, but in his philosophy the central fire never dies: the world "was ever, is now, and ever
shall be, an ever-living Fire." But fire is something continually changing, and its permanence is
rather that of a process than that of a substance--though this view should not be attributed to
Heraclitus.
Science, like philosophy, has sought to escape from the doctrine of perpetual flux by finding some
permanent substratum amid chang-