evident, I have noticed with regard to it what strikes me as at least a want of clearness.
What, let us ask, is a breach in the continuous existence of a thing? It does not lie in mere ‘existence,’ for that is nothing at all; and it cannot again be spatial or temporal merely, for a breach there is impossible. A time, for instance, if really broken, would not be a broken time, but would have become two series with no temporal relation, and therefore with no breach. A breach therefore is but relative, and it involves an unbroken whole in which it takes place. For a temporal breach, that is, you must have first one continuous duration. Now this duration cannot consist, we have seen, of bare time, but is one duration because it is characterized throughout by one content—let us call it A. Then within this you must have also another content—let us call it b; only b is not to qualify the whole of A, but merely a part or rather parts of it. The residue of A, qualified not by b but by some other character which is negative of b, is that part of duration which in respect of b can constitute a breach. And the point which I would emphasize is this, that apart from qualification by one and the same character b, and again partial qualification by another character hostile to b, there is simply no sense or meaning in speaking of the duration of b, rather than that of something else, or in speaking of a temporal end to or of a breach in b’s existence. The duration of a thing, unless the thing’s quality is throughout identical, is really nonsense.
I do not know how much of the above may to the reader seem irrelevant and useless. I am doing my best to help him to meet objections to the fundamental sameness of all identity. These objections, to repeat, seem to me to rest on the superstition that, because there are diverse identities, these cannot have one underlying character, and the superstition again that there is a foreign existence outside character and with a chasm between the two. Such crude familiar divisions of common sense are surely in philosophy mere superstitions. And I would gladly argue against something better if I knew where to find it.
But, despite my fear of irrelevancy, I will add some words on ‘numerical’ identity and difference. I venture to think this in one way a very difficult matter. I do not mean that it is difficult in principle, and that its difficulty tends to drive one to the sameness and difference of mere ‘existence,’ or to distinction without difference, or to any other chimæra. If indeed we could assume blindly, as is often assumed, that the character of numerical sameness is at bottom temporal or spatial, there would be little to say beyond what has been said already.
Numerical distinction is not distinction without difference, for that once more is senseless, but it may be called distinction
