Note C. Identity.
In the preceding Note we were led to consider a question about Identity, and I will here go on to deal with some others. It would of course be far better that such questions should arise and be answered each in its proper place, but except in a systematic treatise that is not possible. It may be that identity should be used only in a restricted sense, but in any case such a restriction would involve and have to be based on a comprehensive enquiry. And apart from a restriction the whole question about identity would cover the entire field of metaphysics. Wherever there is a unity of the manifold, there is an identity in diversity, and a study of the principal forms of unity in difference would not leave much outside it. And hence, because I could not treat properly the different forms of identity, I did not attempt even to set them out. Certainly I saw no advantage in cataloguing every-day distinctions, such as those between two men of the same sort, and two men in the same place or time, and again two periods of a man’s one life. It did not occur to me that such distinctions could fail to be familiar or that any one could desire to be informed of them. I presupposed as a matter of course a knowledge of them, and, if I myself anywhere confused them, I have not found the place.[1] And I cannot attempt any thorough investigation of their nature or of many other problems that must arise in any serious effort to deal with identity. I will however add here some remarks which are offered to the reader for whatever they may be worth to him.
I. The first question I will ask is whether all identity is qualitative. This is closely connected with the discussion of the preceding Note, which I take here to have been read. Now the answer to our question must depend on the sense in which we use ‘quality.’ Any one can of course perceive that the sameness of a thing with itself at different times differs from its possession with another thing of one and the same character. And, as we have seen, if quality is restricted to that which is the term of a relation, then at any stage before distinction obviously you will have no quality. The unity of a felt whole, for example, which is certainly an identity, will as certainly not be qualitative, nor will there be qualitative sameness ever between what is felt and then later perceived. But, as we saw, the whole question is in part one of words, ‘quality’ being a term which is ambiguous. In its lowest meaning it applies to anything that in any sense qualifies and makes anything to be somewhat. It therefore will
- ↑ Cf. p. 616 (the Note on p. 313).
