contradiction what in the end would satisfy the intellect supposing that it could be got? This question, I venture to think, is too often ignored. Too often a writer will criticise and condemn some view as being that which the mind cannot accept, when he apparently has never asked himself what it is that would satisfy the intellect, or even whether the intellect could endure his own implied alternative. What in the end then, let us ask, would content the intellect?
While the diversities are external to each other and to their union, ultimate satisfaction is impossible. There must, as we have seen, be an identity and in that identity a ground of dis- tinction and connection. But that ground, if external to the elements into which the conjunction must be analyzed, becomes for the intellect a fresh element, and it itself calls for synthesis in a fresh point of unity. But hereon, because in the intellect no intrinsic connections were found, ensues the infinite process. Is there a remedy for this evil?
The remedy might lie here. If the diversities were comple- mentary aspects of a process of connection and distinction, the process not being external to the elements or again a foreign compulsion of the intellect, but itself the intellect's own proprius motus> the case would be altered. Each aspect would of itself be a transition to the other aspect, a transition intrinsic and natural at once to itself and to the intellect. And the Whole would be a self-evident analysis and synthesis of the intellect itself by itself. Synthesis here has ceased to be mere synthesis and has become self-completion, and analysis, no longer mere analysis, is self-explication. And the question how or why the many are one and the one is many here loses its meaning. There is no why or how beside the self- evident process, and towards its own differences this whole is at once their how and their why, their being, substance and system, their reason, ground, and principle of diversity and unity.
Has the Law of Contradiction anything here to condemn? It seems to me it has nothing. The identity of which diversities are predicated is in no case simple. There is no point which is not itself internally the transition to its complement, and there is no unity which fails in internal diversity and ground of distinction. In short " the identity of opposites," far from conflicting with the Law of Contradiction, may claim to be the one view which satisfies its demands, the only theory which everywhere refuses to accept a standing contradiction.1 And if all that we find were in the end such a self-evident and self-complete whole, containing in itself as constituent processes the detail of the Universe, so far as I see the intellect would receive satisfaction in full. But 1 On this and other points I would refer to Mr. McTaggart's excellent work on Hegelian Dialectic.
APPENDIX. 569 for myself, unable to verify a solution of this kind, connections in the end must remain in part mere syntheses, the putting together of differences external to one another and to that which couples them. And against my intellectual world the Law of Contradiction has therefore claims nowhere satisfied in full. And since, on the other hand, the intellect insists that these demands must be and are met, I am led to hold that they are met in and by a whole beyond the mere intellect. And in the intellect itself I seem to find an inner want and defect and a demand thus to pass itself beyond itself. And against this conclusion I have not yet seen any tenable objection.
The view which to me appears to be true is briefly this. That abstract identity should satisfy the intellect, even in part, is wholly impossible. On the other hand I cannot say that to me any principle or principles of diversity in unity are self-evident. The existence of a single content (I will not call it a quality) which should be simple experience and being in one is to me not in itself impossible intrinsically. If I may speak mythologically I am not sure that, if no diversity were given, the intellect of itself could invent it or would even demand it. But, since diversity is there as a fact, any such hypothesis seems illegitimate. As a fact and given we have in feeling diversity and unity in one whole, a whole implicit and not yet broken up into terras and relations. This immediate union of the one and ninny is an "ultimate fact" from which we start; and to hold that feeling, because immediate, must be simple and without diversity is, in my view, a doctrine quite untenable.1 That I myself should have been taken as committed to this doctrine is to me, I must be allowed to add, really surprising. But feeling, if an ultimate fact, is not true ultimately or real. Even of itself it is self-transcendent and transitory. And, when we try to think its unity, then, as we have seen, we end in failure. For thought in its own nature has no " together " and is forced to move by way of terms and relations, and the unity of these remains in the end external and, because external, inconsistent But the conclusion I would recommend is no vain attempt either to accept bare identity or to relapse into a stage before thinking begins. Self-existence and self-identity are to be found, I would urge, in a whole beyond thought, a whole to which thought points and in which it is included, but which is known only in abstract character and could not be verified in its detail.
And since I have been taken to build on assumptions which I am unable to recognize, I will here repeat what it is that I have assumed I have assumed first that truth has to satisfy the 1 Feeling is certainly not " un-differentiated " if that means that it contains no diverse aspects. I would take the opportunity to state that this view as to feeling is so far from being novel that I owe it, certainly in the main, to Hegel's psychology.
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intellect, and that what does not do this is neither true nor real. This assumption I can defend only by showing that any would-be objector assumes it also. And I start from the root- idea of being or experience, which is at once positive and ultimate. Then I certainly do not go on to assume about being that it must be self-contained, simple or what not? — but I proceed in another manner. I take up certain facts or truths (call them what you please) that I find are offered me, and I care very little what it is I take up. These facts or truths, as they are offered, I find my intellect rejects, and I go on to discover why it rejects them. It is because they contradict themselves. They offer, that is, a complex of diversities con joined in a way which does not satisfy my intellect, a way which it feels is not its way and which it cannot repeat as its own, a way which for it results in mere collision. For, to be satisfied, my intellect must understand, and it cannot understand by taking a congeries, if I may say so, in the lump. My intellect may for certain purposes, to use an old figure, swallow mysteries un- chewed, but unchewed it is unable in the end to stomach and digest them. It has not, as some opponents of Hegel would seem to assume, any such strange faculty of sensuous intuition. On the contrary my intellect is discursive, and to understand it must go from one point to another, and in the end also must go by a movement which it feels satisfies its nature. Thus, to understand a complex AB> I must begin with A or B. And beginning, say, with A, if I then merely find B, I have either lost A or I have got beside A something else, and in neither case have I understood. For my intellect cannot simply unite a diversity, nor has it in itself any form or way of togetherness, and you gain nothing if beside A and B you offer me their conjunction in fact. For to my intellect that is no more than another external element. And "facts," once for all, are for my intellect not true unless they satisfy it. And, so far as they are not true, then, as they are offered, they are not reality.
From this I conclude that what is real must be self-contained and self-subsistent and not qualified from the outside. For an external qualification is a mere conjunction, and that, we have seen, is for the intellect an attempt of diversities simply to identify themselves, and such an attempt is what we mean by self-con- tradiction. Hence whatever is real must be qualified from itself, and that means that, so far as it is real, it must be self-contained and self-subsistent. And, since diversities exist, they must there- fore somehow be true and real; and since, to be understood and to be true and real, they must be united, hence they must be true and real in such a way that from A ox B the intellect can pass to its further qualification without an external determination of either. But this means that A and B are united, each from its APPENDIX. 571 own nature, in a whole which is the nature of both alike. And hence it follows that in the end there is nothing real but a whole of this kind.1 From the other side — Why do I hold reality to be a self- contained and self-consistent individual? It is because otherwise, if I admit an external determination and a qualification by an other, I am left with a conjunction, and that for the intellect is a self-contradiction. On the other hand the real cannot be simple, because, to be understood, it must somehow be taken with and be qualified by the diversity which is a fact. The diversity there- fore must fall within and be subordinate to a self-determined whole, an individual system, and any other determination is incompatible with reality. These ideas may be mistaken, but to my mind they do not seem to be obscure, nor again are they novel. But if I may judge from the way in which some critics have taken them, they must involve some great obscurity or difficulty. But, not apprehending this, I am unfortunately unable to discuss it.2 We have found that nothing in itself is opposite and refuses to unite. Everything again is opposite if brought together into a point which owns no internal diversity. Every bare conjunction is therefore contradictory when taken up by thought, because thought in its nature is incapable of conjunction and has no way of mere "together." On the other side no such conjunction is or possibly could be given. It is itself a mere abstraction, useful perhaps and so legitimate and so far valid, but taken otherwise to be condemned as the main root of error.
Contradiction is appearance, everywhere removable by distinc- tion and by further supplement, and removed actually, if not in 1 And hence it follows also that every "part" of this whole must be in- ternally defective and (when thought) contradictory. For otherwise how from one to others and the rest could there l>e any internal passage? And without such a passage and with but an external junction or bond, could there be any system or whole at all which would satisfy the intellect, and could be taken as real or possible? I at least have given my reason for answering this question in the negative. We may even, forgetting other points of view, say of the world, " Thus every part is full of vice, Yet the whole mass a paradise.''
* The T.aw of Identity, I may be allowed to note in this connection, Is the denial that truth, if true, is altcraMe from the outside. For, if so, it would become either itself conjoined with its own absence, or itself conjoined with a positive other; and either alternative (to take them here as alternatives), we have seen, is self-contradictory. Hence any mere context cannot modify a truth so far as it is true. It merely adds, we must say, something more which leaves the truth itself unaffected. Truth cannot be modified, in other words, except from within. This of course opens a problem, for truth seems on the one hand to be abstract, as truth, and so incomplete, and on the other han<l, if true, to be self-contained and even self-existent. For the Law of Identity the reader is further referred to the Index.
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and by the mere intellect, by the whole which transcends it. On the other hand contradiction, or rather what becomes such, as soon as it is thought out, is everywhere necessary. Facts and views partial and one-sided, incomplete and so incoherent — things that offer themselves as characters of a Reality which they cannot express, and which present in them moves them to jar with and to pass beyond themselves — in a word appearances are the stuff of which the Universe is made. If we take them in their proper character we shall be prone neither to over-estimate nor to slight them.
We have now seen the nature of incompatibles or contraries. There are no native contraries, and we have found no reason to entertain such an idea. Things are contrary when, being diverse, they strive to be united in one point which in itself does not admit of internal diversity. And for the intellect any bare con- junction is an attempt of this sort. The intellect has in its nature no principle of mere togetherness, and the intellect again can accept nothing which is alien to itself. A foreign togetherness of elements is for the intellect, therefore, but one offered external element the more. And, since the intellect demands a unity, every distinguishable aspect of a "together" must be brought into one. And if in this unity no internal connection of diversity natural to the intellect can be found, we are left with a diversity belonging to and conjoined in one undistinguished point. And this is contradiction, and contradiction in the end we found was this and nothing but this. On the other hand we urged that bare irrational conjunctions are not given as facts. Every perceived complex is a selection from an indefinite back- ground, and, when judged as real, it is predicated both of this background and of the Reality which transcends it. Hence in this background and beyond it lies, we may believe, the reason and the internal connection of all we take as a mere external "together." Conjunction and contradiction in short is but our defect, our onesidedness, and our abstraction? and it is appearance and not Reality. But the reason we have to assume may in detail be not accessible to our intellect Note B. Relation and Quality.
There are some aspects of the general problem of Relation and Quality on which I will offer some words of explanation. The subject is large and difficult, and deserves a far more thorough treatment than I am able at present to bestow on it. There is the question (i) whether qualities can exist independent of some whole, (ii) whether they can exist independent of relations, (iii) whether, where there are fresh relations, new qualities are made and old ones altered, or whether again one can have a APPENDIX. 573 merely external relation, and, lastly (iv), whether and in what sense, wherever there is an identity, we have a right to speak of a relation.
(i and ii) Within any felt whole — and that term includes here anything which contains an undistinguished diversity, any totality of aspects which is not broken up — the diversities qualify that whole, and are felt as making it what it is. Are these diversities to be called qualities (p. 27)? It is really perhaps a verbal question. Anything that is somewhat at all may be said to be or to have a quality. But on the other hand we may prefer to use quality specially of those diversities which are developed when wholes are analyzed into terms and relations. And, when we ask if there can be qualities without relations, this distinction becomes important The question must be answered affirmatively if we call by the name of quality the diverse aspects of feeling. But on the other hand such diverse aspects cannot exist inde- pendently. They are not given except as contained in and as qualifying some whole, and their independence consists merely in our vicious abstraction. Nor when we pass to the relational stage does diversity cease to be the inseparable adjective of unity. For the relations themselves cannot exist except within and as the adjectives of an underlying unity. The whole that is analyzed into relations and terms can fall into the background and be obscured, but it can never be dissipated. And, if it were dissipated, then with it both terms and relations would perish. For there is no absolute " between " or " together," nor can "between" and "together" be the mere adjectives of self- existent units. Qualities in the end can have no meaning except as contained in and as dependent on some whole, and whether that whole is relational or otherwise makes no difference in this respect.
And it is not hard, perhaps, at this point to dispose of a fallacy which seems somewhat common. You may take, it is said, some terms, A, B, and C, and may place them in various relations, X, Y, and Z> and through all they remain still A, B, and C. And this, it is urged, proves that A, B, and C exist, or may exist, free from all relations or at least independently. My character, for example, may be compared with that of another man, or, having first lived to the north of him, I may then change to the south; and to neither of us need it make a difference, and therefore we both are unaffected and so inde- dependent But an answer to this fallacy seems even obvious. What is proved is that a certain character may, as such and in respect of that character, exist indifferently in various relations. But what is not proved at all is that this character could exist independent and naked. And since the argument starts by presupposing without any enquiry the independent existence of the character and indeed rests throughout on that presupposed 574 APPENDIX.
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existence, it could in no case arrive, it seems to me, at the vdesired conclusion. The most that it could show would be that some relations are external and may make no difference to their terms. But to argue from this that all the relations are or even may be external, and that some qualities either do or may exist independently, seems quite illogical. Such an argument obviously could at once be met by a distinction drawn between different kinds of relations.
(iii) For myself I neither make nor accept such a distinction except as relative and subordinate. I do not admit that any relation whatever can be merely external and make no difference to its terms, and I will now proceed to discuss this important point. I will begin by first dismissing a difficult question.
Qualities exist, we have seen, improperly as diverse aspects of felt wholes, and then again properly as terms which are distinguished and related. But how far are we to say that such characters as those e.g. of different colours are made by distinc- I tion, and were not of the same quality at all when mere aspects of the un-analyzed? To this question I will not attempt a reply, I because I am sure that I should not do it justice. I have great sympathy with the view that such characters are so developed as ■ to be in a sense constituted by distinction, but I cannot defend ' this view or identify myself with it. And for myself, and for argument's sake at least, I shall admit that a quality in feeling may already have the character, A or B, which we find when afterwards quality proper is made by distinction. In no case (to repeat) will there be a quality existing independently, but while you keep to aspects of a felt whole it will not be true that every quality depends on relation. And on the other hand between such aspects and qualities proper there may be an identity in some character A or B.
From this we are led to the question, Are qualities and in general are terms altered necessarily by the relations into which they enter? In other words are there any relations which are merely extrinsical? And by this I do not mean to ask if there can be relations outside of and independent of some whole, for that question I regard as answered in the negative. I am asking whether, within the whole and subject to that, terms can enter into further relations and not be affected by them. And this question again is not, Can A, B, and C become the terms of fresh relations, and still remain A, B, and C? For clearly a thing may be altered partly and yet retain a certain character, and one and the same character may persist unaltered though the terms that possess it are in some other ways changed. And this is a point on which in the present connection I shall have later to insist. Further our question does not ask if terms are in any sense whatever qualified by their relations. For every one, I presume, admits this in some sense, however hard that APPENDIX. 575 APPENDIX. 575 sense may be to fix. The question I am putting is whether relations can qualify terms, A, B, and C, from the outside merely and without in any way affecting and altering them internally. And this question I am compelled to answer negatively.
At first sight obviously such external relations seem possible and even existing. They seem given to us, we saw, in change of spatial position and again also in comparison. That you do not alter what you compare or re-arrange in space seems to Common Sense quite obvious, and that on the other side there are as obvious difficulties does not occur to Common Sense at all. And I will begin by pointing out these difficulties that stand in the way of our taking any relations as quite external In a mental act, such for instance as comparison, there is a relation in the result, and this relation, we hear, is to make no difference to the terms. But, if so, to what does it make a difference, and what is the meaning and sense of qualifying the terms by it? If in short it is external to the terms, how can it possibly be true of them? To put the same thing otherwise, if we merely make the conclusion, is that conclusion a true one? But if the terms from their inner nature do not enter into the relation, then, so far as they are concerned, they seem related for no reason at all, and, so far as they are concerned, the relation seems arbitrarily made. But otherwise the terms themselves seem affected by a merely external relation. To find the truth of things by making relations about them seems indeed a very strange process, and confronted with this problem Common Sense, I presume, would take refuge in confused metaphors.
And alterations of position in space once more give rise to difficulty. Things are spatially related, first in one way, and then become related in another way, and yet in no way themselves are altered; for the relations, it is said, are but external. But I reply that, if so, I cannot understand the leaving by the terms of one set of relations and their adoption of another fresh set The process and its result to the terms, if they contribute nothing to it, seems really irrational throughout. But, if they contribute anything, they must surely be affected internally. And by the introduction of an outer compelling agency the difficulty is not lessened. The connection of the terms with this agency, and the difference it seems to make to them, where by the hypothesis no difference can be made, seem a hopeless puzzle. In short all we reach by it is the admission thai the terms and their relation do not by themselves include all the facts, and beyond that admission it is useless. And this leads to a further doubt about the sufficiency of external relations. Every sort of whole, and certainly every arrangement in space, has a qualitative aspect In various respects the whole has a character — even its figure may here be included — which cannot be shown to consist barely in mere terms and mere relations 576 APPENDIX.
between them. You may say that this character belongs to them, but it still is more than what they are by themselves. And if things in space by a new arrangement produce a fresh aspect of quality, of what, I would ask, are you going to predicate this quality? If the terms contribute anything whatever, then the terms are affected by their arrangement. And to predicate the new result barely of the external relations seems, to me at least, impossible. This question — as to how far by external relations fresh quality can be produced — is one which would carry us very far. I notice it here as a further difficulty which besets the thesis of mere extrinsical relation. And if in conclusion I am told that, of course, there are upon any view difficulties, I am ready to assent. But the question is whether this doctrine, offered as obvious, does not turn mere difficulties into sheer self-contradictions, and whether once more except as a relative point of view it is not as uncalled for as it is in principle false.
But the facts, it will be said, of spatial arrangement and of comparison, to mention only these, force you, whether you like it or not, to accept the view that at least some relations are outward only. Now that for working purposes we treat, and do well to treat, some relations as external merely I do not deny, and that, of course, is not the question at issue here. That question is in short whether this distinction of internal and external is absolute or is but relative, and whether in the end and in principle a mere external relation is possible and forced on us by the facts. And except as a subordinate view I submit that the latter thesis is untenable. But the discussion of this matter involves unfortunately a wide and difficult range of questions, and my treatment of it must be brief and, I fear, otherwise imperfect.