Let us go on to consider the question as to identity. This Phenomenalism should deny, because identity is a real union of the diverse. But change is not to be denied, for obviously it must be there when something happens. Now, if there is change, there is by consequence something which changes. But if it changes, it is the same throughout a diversity. It is, in other words, a real unity, a concrete universal. Take, for example, the fact of motion; evidently here something alters its place. Hence a variety of places, whatever that means—in any case a variety—must be predicated of one something. If so, we have at once on our hands the One and the Many, and otherwise our theory declines to deal with ordinary fact.
In brief, identity—being that which the doctrine excluded—is essential to its being. And now how far is this to go? Is the series of phenomena, with its differences, one series? If it is not one, why treat it as if it were so? If it is one, then here indeed is a unity which gives us pause. Again, are the elements ever permanent and remaining identical from one time to another? But, whether they are or are not identical, how are facts to be explained? Suppose, in the first place, that we do have identical elements, surviving amid change and the play of variety. Here are metaphysical reals, raising the old questions we have been discussing through this Book. But perhaps nothing is really permanent except the laws. The problem of change is given up, and we fall back upon our laws, persisting and appearing in successions of fleeting elements. If so, phenomena seem now to have become temporal illustrations of laws.
And it is perhaps time to ask a question concerning the nature of these last-mentioned creatures. Are they permanent real essences, visible from time to time in their fleeting illustrations? If so, once more Phenomenalism has adored blindly what it
