Yet there have not been wanting attempts to get rid of the paradox by denying its truth. As the Eleatics sought to escape it by reducing change itself to a baseless illusion, so some at least of the disciples of Heracleitus seem to have evaded it by refusing to admit any permanent identity in the changeable, and they have not been entirely without imitators in the modern world. Incessant change without underlying unity has had its defenders in the history of Metaphysics, though they have not been numerous, and we must therefore briefly consider what can be urged for and against such a concept. Apart from the general difficulty of seeing how what changes can at the same time be permanently identical with itself, the only special argument in favour of the doctrine that only incessant change is real seems to be the appeal to direct experience. In any actual experience, it is contended, however contracted its limits, we are always presented with the fact of change and transition; we never apprehend an absolutely unchanging content. Even where the object before us exhibits no succession, self-examination will always detect at least alternating tension and relaxation of attention with the accompanying fluctuations of bodily sensation. Now there can, of course, be no gainsaying these facts of experience, but the conclusion based on them evidently goes much further than the premisses warrant. If experience never gives us mere persistence of an unchanging content, neither does it ever give us mere change without persistence. What we actually experience always exhibits the two aspects of identity and transition together. Usually there will be, side by side with the elements which sensibly change in the course of the experience, others which remain sensibly constant throughout it. And even when, through inattention, we fail to detect these constant elements, the successive states of the changing content itself are not merely momentary; each has its own sensible duration through which it retains its character without perceptible changes. Experience thus entirely fails to substantiate the notion of mere change apart from a background of permanent identity.