that there is no question. The question is, in a word, about the amount and degree of its necessity and contingency. Have I a right, wherever I find partial sameness, to speak of resemblance, in the proper sense, as I had a right under the same conditions to speak of a relation? As a matter of fact not all identity appears under the form of resemblance, and can I conclude, Somehow in the Absolute it all must, and therefore does, possess this form, and may therefore everywhere be spoken of as possessing it? The answer to this question is to be found, I presume, in an enquiry into the conditions of resemblance. What is it that is added to the experience of partial sameness in order to make it into the experience of resemblance? Can this addition be looked on as a development of sameness from within, and as a necessary step to its completion, or does it on the other hand depend on conditions which are relatively external? How direct, in other words, is the connection between resemblance and identity, and, in order to get the former from the latter, what amount of other conditions would you have to bring in, and how far in the end could you say that the resemblance came from the identity rather than from these other conditions? If you can conclude, as for myself I certainly cannot, that resemblance (proper) is an essential development of sameness, then if you will also affirm the principle that in Reality what must be is actual already—you will have a right for certain purposes to call the same ‘similar,’ even where no similarity appears. But to do this otherwise, except of course by way of a working fiction, will surely be indefensible.[1]
With this I must end these too imperfect remarks on relation and quality. I will take up some other points with regard to Identity and Resemblance in the following Note.
- ↑ This is not an idle question but very nearly concerns a mode of thought which, a generation or so back, was dominant amongst us, and even now has some supporters. It was denied by this, on the one hand, that there was any sameness in character except similarity, and it was asserted on the other hand that except in and for an actual particular experience there was no similarity. And yet the similarity, e.g. of my past and present states of mind, was treated as a fact which did not call for any explanation. To this point I called attention in my work on Logic (Book II, Part II, Chap, i), and I adduced it as one proof among many others of superficiality and of bankruptcy in respect of first principles. And I do not understand why any one who is prepared to disagree with this verdict does not at least make some attempt to face and deal with the difficulty. The ordinary device of J. S. Mill and his school is a crude identification of possibility with fact, of potential with actual existence, the meaning of potential existence of course never being so much as asked. This crude unthinking identification is, we may say, a characteristic of the school. It is all that with regard to first principles seems to stand between it and bankruptcy, and any one who really desires to dispute the bankruptcy cannot, I think, fairly leave unnoticed this special question about similarity, as well as in general the relation of the possible to the real.
