that in the universe there is nothing beyond this single aspect, seems quite irrational.
But the reader may agree that no one really can believe that mere thought includes everything. The difficulty lies, he may urge, in maintaining the opposite. Since in philosophy we must think, how is it possible to transcend thought without a self-contradiction? For theory can reflect on, and pronounce about, all things, and in reflecting on them it therefore includes them. So that to maintain in thought an Other is by the same act to destroy its otherness, and to persist is to contradict oneself. While admitting that thought cannot satisfy us as to reality’s falling wholly within its limits, we may be told that, so long as we think, we must ignore this admission. And the question is, therefore, whether philosophy does not end in sheer scepticism—in the necessity, that is, of asserting what it is no less induced to deny. The problem is serious, and I will now attempt to exhibit its solution.
We maintain an Other than mere thought. Now in what sense do we hold this? Thought being a judgment, we say that the predicate is never the same as the subject; for the subject is reality presented as “this” (we must not say as mere “this”). You can certainly abstract from presentation its character of “thisness,” or its confused relatedness; and you can also abstract the feature of presentation. Of these you can make ideas,[1] for there is nothing which you cannot think of. But you find that these ideas are not the same as the subject of which you must predicate them. You can think of the subject, but you cannot get rid of it, or substitute mere thought-content for it. In other words, in practice thought always is found with, and appears to demand, an Other.
- ↑ Principles of Logic, pp. 64-69.
