"As no man fording a stream can dip his foot twice in the same water, so no man can, with exactness, affirm of anything in the sensible world that it is. As he utters the words, nay, as he thinks them, the predicate ceases to be applicable; the present becomes the past; the 'is' should be 'was.' And the more we learn of the nature of things, the more evident it is that what we call rest is only unperceived activity; that seeming peace is silent but strenuous battle. In every part, at every moment, the state of the cosmos is the expression of a transitory adjustment of contending forces; a scene of strife in which all combatents fall in turn. What is true of each part, is true of the whole. Natural knowledge tends more and more to the conclusion that 'all the choir of heaven and the furniture of the earth' are transitory forms of parcels of cosmic substance wending along the road of evolution, from nebulous potentiality, through endless growths of sun and planet and satellite; through all varieties of matter; through infinite diversities of life and thought; possibly, through modes of being of which we have neither a conception, nor are competent to form any, back to the indefinable latency from which they arose."
T. H. Huxley
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