Abstract

One of the most obvious features of life is that it changes. It is not simply that people and things come and go, that they are transitory. It is, rather, that they don't remain the same even during their brief life-span. The celebrated German philosopher, Hegel, is frequently cited as the modern thinker who thematized the reality of change and made it the basis, indeed the substance, of a whole philosophical system. Closer to the Catholic world is the figure of John Henry Newman, who claimed uncontroversially that to live is to change, and that to live well is to have changed many times.