VII. I will go on to notice an objection which has been made by several critics. It is expressed in the following extract from the Philosophical Review, Vol. iv. p. 235: “All phenomena are regarded as infected with the same contradiction, in that they all involve a union of the One and the Many. It is therefore impossible to apply the notion of Degrees of Truth and Reality. If all appearances are equally contradictory, all are equally incapable of aiding us to get nearer to the ultimate nature of Reality.” And it is added that on this point there seems to be a consensus of opinion among my critics.
Now I think I must have failed to understand the exact nature of this point, since, as I understand it, it offers no serious difficulty. In fact this matter, I may say, is for good or for evil so old and so familiar to my mind that it did not occur to me as a difficulty at all, and so was not noticed. But suppose that in theology I say that all men before God, and measured by him, are equally sinful—does that preclude me from also holding that one is worse or better than another? And if I accept the fact of degrees in virtue, may I not believe also that virtue is one and is perfection and that you must attain to it or not? And is all this really such a hopeless puzzle? Suppose that for a certain purpose I want a stick exactly one yard long, am I wrong when I condemn both one inch and thirty-five inches, and any possible sum of inches up to thirty-six, as equally and alike coming short? Surely if you view perfection and completeness in one way, it is a case of either Yes or No, you have either reached it or not, and there either is defect or there is none. But in the imperfect, viewed otherwise, there is already more or less of a quality or character, the self-same character which, if all defect were removed, would attain to and itself would be perfection. Wherever there is a scale of degrees you may treat the steps of this as being more or less perfect, or again you may say, No they are none of them perfect, and so regarded they are equal, and there is no difference between them. That indeed is what must happen when you ask of each whether it is perfect or not.
This question of Yes or No I asked about appearances in connection with Reality, and I have in my book used language which certainly contradicts itself, unless the reader perceives that there is more than one point of view. And I assumed that the reader would perceive this, and I cannot doubt that very often he has done so, and I think that even always he might have done so, if he would but carry into metaphysics all the ideas with which he is acquainted outside, and not an arbitrary selection from them. And among the ideas to be thus treated not as true but as at least existing, I would instance specially some leading ideas of the Christian religion as to freedom, the
