another aspect, this will not furnish the positive idea of unity which we seek. But, apart from and without any such explicit idea, we may be truly said to feel our whole psychical state as one. Above, or rather below, the relations which afterwards we may find, it seems to be a totality in which differences already are combined.[1] Our state seems a felt background into which we introduce distinctions, and it seems, at the same time, a whole in which the differences inhere and pre-exist. Now certainly, in so describing our state, we contradict ourselves. For the fact of a difference, when we realize and express its strict nature, implies in its essence both relation and distinction. In other words, feeling cannot be described, for it cannot without transformation be translated into thought. Again, in itself this indiscriminate totality is inconsistent and unstable. Its own tendency and nature is to pass beyond itself into the relational consciousness, into a higher stage in which it is broken up. Still, none the less, at every moment this vague state is experienced actually. And hence we cannot deny that complex wholes are felt as single experiences. For, on the one side, these states are not simple, nor again, on the other side, are they plural merely; nor again is their unity explicit and held in relation with, and against, their plurality.
We may find this exemplified most easily in an ordinary emotional whole. That comes to us as one, yet not as simple; while its diversity, at least in part, is not yet distinguished and broken up into relations. Such a state of mind, I may repeat, is, as such, unstable and fleeting. It is not only changeable otherwise, but, if made an object, it, as such, disappears. The emotion we attend to is, taken strictly, never precisely the same thing as the emotion which we feel. For it not only to some
- ↑ Compare here Chapter xix.
