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Logic. Of course these researches have been both curious and important; but in as far as they aim at reducing the judgment to an identity without difference, they are off the track of living thought. Jevons's idea of Identity is very difficult; I can hardly suppose it to be thought out. But what he says (Principles of Science, pp. 16-17) about the negative symbol which indicates difference, "or the absence of complete sameness," means, I think, that he considers difference an imperfection in identity. Jevons writes the judgment, "All Dicotyledons are Exogenous," as "Dicotyledons Exogens," which he takes to mean, I suppose, that the two classes are composed of the same individuals; i.e., their identity is in the mere sameness of the individuals. What this judgment really means is that in a particular kind of subject, a kind of tree, the different attributes of having two seed-leaves and of making fresh wood on the outside are conjoined, with a slight presumption of causality. The whole point and significance of the identity depends. on the depth of the difference. So that though you can, under certain conditions, take the one term and deal with it as if it was the other, yet that is only a consequence of the real import of the judgment; the real point and import is to look at the two together, as united in the same subject.

In Psychology the difference between the conception of concrete and abstract identity shows itself in the theory of Association, especially in the attitude taken up towards the law of Association by Similarity. If Identity is atomic or abstract, i.e., excludes difference, then you cannot speak of your present impression as being identical, or having identical elements with a former impression which, qua former, is by the hypothesis different; and, consequently, you must say that the first step in Association always is to go from your present impression back to another impression which is like it, before you can get to the adjuncts of that former impression, of which adjuncts the revival by association is to be explained. This first step is Association by Similarity, which, according to what was till recently, I believe, the received English theory, must always precede Association by Contiguity; that is, the transition to those adjuncts of the former impression, the recalling of which by something in present consciousness is the problem to be explained. The theoretical question at issue is mainly the degree in which the processes of consciousness are homogeneous at its different levels. Association of particulars might lead up to Inference from particulars to particulars, but could never

lead up to the activity of judgment and inference considered as the interconnexion of universals.

The question of fact which is involved in this question of theory is one of extreme interest. It is whether we do, in what is called transition by association, go from the presented element to the quite different context which it recalls, through a distinct particular reproduction of a former impression similar to that now presented. If this is so, we go to Contiguity always through Similarity, and in doing so we revive our former impression (I adopt the language of the theory, though, if there is no identity, we cannot revive a former impression but only one like it) with complete exactness, just as if we were taking a print out of a portfolio. And the idea that we do this is attractive, because in some cases we appear to be aware of doing it in a striking way of going right back into a former and similar state of consciousness, before we go on to the further adjuncts contiguous with that former state of consciousness.

But I do not think that this popular idea will really bear examination in the light of facts. It is plain that, as a rule, the element in present perception which sets up an association is not a particular complete in itself, and operative by calling up a former separate or self-complete particular resembling it. On the contrary, the element which sets up an association can be seen very easily (if we think of hourly, normal occurrences of the process, and not merely of striking examples in which a picturesque memory is at work), to be a characteristic in a present complex perception, not itself sensuously isolable, but identical with something in a former complex perception, and recalling directly, without intermediation of a similar particular, some adjunct of the former complex perception. And this adjunct, the idea whose reproduction is to be explained, is not itself a particular, but is a complex dominated by a type or rule of interconnexion, which does not appear in the mind with its old particular content, but with a new one largely furnished and modified by the present content of consciousness.1 The more closely we examine the matter, the less we shall think that contents brought up by association reappear in their old form like prints out of a portfolio, or involve an intermediate reproduction of the old case similar to the new perception which starts the process. The illusion comes from seeking out

1 It will be obvious to all who are familiar with the subject that I am borrowing largely from Mr. Bradley's chapter on Association in Principles of Logic.

very elaborate examples. The common cases in which association and inference can barely be distinguished are perfectly good instances, and show the continuity of the intellectual function. I hear a rumbling in the street and think that an omnibus is passing, or a double knock and know that the letters have come. I do not go back to the last particular rumble or postman's knock, or expect letters like the last which came.

The interest of those who believe in concrete Identity, in thus reducing the two "Laws of Association" to the one Law of Contiguity, is to enforce the idea that the content of consciousness is never merely simple or particular, and that in association, as in judgment, the universal or meeting-point of differences furnishes the true guide to the intellectual process.

This reduction is beginning to be accepted (e.g., Mr. Sully mentions it, and Mr. Ward in some degree adopts it), not perhaps in the full sense here claimed for it, but merely as a preferable statement of the operation of ideas which are particulars. I doubt, for example, whether Mr. Sully has abandoned the Scotch or English ground of atomism in ideas. But to recognise identity as the universal makes the associative process far simpler, and homogeneous with the whole remaining evolution of consciousness.

In Ethical Philosophy the desire to exclude difference from identity produces analogous difficulties to those which we have noticed in Logic and Psychology. If, in short, difference is excluded from identity, how are you ever to get from one self-identical particular to another, whether in inference, or in association, or in moral purpose, or in political obligation? In the sciences that deal with human action the natural atom to start from is, simply putting atom into Latin, the individual human being. Of course an individual human being is a concrete universal, as we saw in speaking of what is meant by a proper name; but as his unity is pressed upon us by merely perceptive synthesis, we are apt to treat it as a datum, or to draw a sharp line between the unity of the individual human being, as a datum of reality, and the unity of human beings in identical sentiments, ideas, purposes or habits, as something not a datum, not real, the mere creation of our comparing intelligence. A striking

example of such a point of view on Ethical ground is the passage in Methods of Ethics, p. 374, where Prof. Sidgwick speaks of testing the feeling of common sense towards the sum of pleasure as an ethical end, by supposing that there was only a single sentient conscious being in the universe.

Of course it is allowable to suppose, for the sake of argument, alteration in a state of things which we know to be actual; but nobody-least of all so cautious a writer as Prof. Sidgwick-would remove in his supposition so enormous an element of the case as man's social life, unless he supposed it to belong less really to the individual's moral identity than his existence as a living body does. This is simply not the fact. Of course, if a plague carried off all men in the world but one, that one might retain his social consciousness and habit of mind. But apart from further religious assumptions, that consciousness would be an illusion, and the man's self would be a mutilated fragment for which no real life was possible. The fairer case to put, which we can observe in fact but too often, is to suppose that the body lives on, but that the real identity with society and humanity—the universal consciousness-is extinguished in that one body by disease. Then we see that it was not in the least a metaphor but an absolutely literal truth to say that the man's real self-what he was as a moral being and in part as a legal person-consisted in a system of universals, or identities including difference-viz., the consciousness of certain relations which, as identities in difference, united him with family, friends and fellow-citizens. Identities in difference, such, e.g., as a man's relation to his son; it is like the case of the two outlines which I mentioned. The two men are bound together by certain facts known to both of them, certain sentiments and purposes, all of which they both share, but in regard to which each of them has a different position from the other, apart from which difference the whole identity would shrink into nothing.

In Political Philosophy, again, we may notice Mr. Spencer's social atomism, curiously doubled with a comparison of the body politic to the living body, in which the state is taken, roughly speaking, as a unit among units, instead of being taken as a real identity throughout the whole. It is a strange fate for Plato's famous simile of the organism to have its contention retorted in this way. A justification might be found for Mr. Spencer by pressing home the idea of a spiritual identity as against an external or legal one, and probably that is the sort of meaning which he has in mind, but he is barred from saying so by disbelieving in identity altogether; and it would not be true, for a spiritual identity will always express itself as a legal one.

I should like to try and illustrate this point of real identity by one further example. We here, the members of the Aristotelian Society, have in our minds, quâ members, a

really identical purpose and endeavour, and consciousness of certain facts, just as actually and truly as we are actually and truly sitting round an identical table. It is not the fact that we are a number of separate individuals or atoms, each completely real in his sensuous identity, and merely cherishing, in addition, certain ideas which happen to resemble each other. In as far as this is fact, it is so in the sense that our moral being has enough in other relations to fill it up and make it real, apart from what we are and do as members of this Society. But in as far as our membership plays any part in our consciousness, so far this real identity actually and in sober earnest forms a part of our being as the individuals that we are, and our solidarity as a Society is only another aspect of a real identity which is recognised in a different form by each several member of the Society, according to his individual relations to it. It may be said: "But our ideas and purposes in respect of the Society are not all the same; they are probably not all even in agreement". But our ideas of the table are not all the same; our perceptions of it are certainly all different-the different angles at which we see it answer for that. No one can prove that we all see it of the same colour, and if we do not, our perceptions of it are even discrepant. Yet we say it is the same table, because, in our worlds which we severally construct and maintain, it fills a corresponding place, and so we do not say that there are as many tables as people; but we call it one and the same table which we all perceive. And so, because this Society to which we belong is recognised by each of us in certain purposes which are relative to the corresponding purposes of others, and which assign different people the places necessary to common action, we call it the same Society, which really exists in the ideal and practical recognition of it by its members, and is something in them which is the same in all of them, and without which they would be so far devoid of a real solidarity which they now possess.

If we once begin trying to exclude difference from identity, we can never stop. The comparison of Locke's discussion with Hume's is interesting in this respect. Hume follows much the same lines as Locke, but bears more distinctly in mind that in explaining an identity which includes difference- -e.g., personal identity-he is not expounding a fact, but is, according to his own principle, accounting for a fallacy. The problem is, of course, as old as Heraclitus. If we want to free identity from differences, we must go to atomic sensation, and then we cannot. Any limit which we place upon

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