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Heraclitus said “You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” He is also quoted as having said “We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not.” Bertrand Russell comments that
The doctrine of the perpetual flux as taught by Heraclitus, is painful, and science, as we have seen, can do nothing to refute it. One of the main ambitions of philosophers has been to revive hopes that science seemed to have killed. Philosophers, accordingly, have sought, with great persistence, for something not subject to the empire of Time.
Similarly,
The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy. It is derived, no doubt, from love of home and desire for a refuge from danger; we find, accordingly, that it is most passionate in those whose lives are most exposed to catastrophe.1
In Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus muses that since all his molecules are replaced every seven years, perhaps he is no longer responsible for a debt he incurred years before that. I find this expression of the conundrum of identity in the face of constant change particularly interesting coming as it does in the piece of fiction most identified with stream of consciousness writing.
The stream, the flow, the flux itself has changed radically in the last half of this century. The idea of flow and flux and change I think would be less frightening for many of us to contemplate now than when Bertrand Russell wrote his History of Western Philosophy, because flow and flux carry a connotation of orderly change and continuity and we now find ourselves swept up in crosscurrents of discontinuous change.
We can see this shift even in our understanding of theories of evolution