doubtless be wrong, but to me this is how the facts come. And I ask why it is impossible that a form or forms of non-temporal and non-spatial identity in difference should serve as the basis of, and should underlie, some distinction. It may be replied that without at least succession in time one would never get to have distinction at all. Yet if in fact this is so—and I do not contest it—I still doubt the conclusion. I am not sure that it follows, because without succession comes no distinction, that all distinction, when you have got it, must be in its character successive. The fact of non-temporal and non-spatial diversity in unity seems at least to exist. The distinctions which I can base on this diversity have, to me at least, in some cases no discoverable character of time or space. And the question is whether the temporal (or, if you will, the spatial) form, which we will take as necessary for distinction in its origin, must essentially qualify it. Is it not possible that, however first got, the form of distinction may become at least in some cases able to exist through and be based on a simpler and non-temporal scheme of diversity in unity? This strikes me as a difficult issue, and I do not pretend here to decide it, and I think it calls for a more careful enquiry than many persons seem inclined to bestow on it.[1] And this is all that I think it well to say on numerical identity.
But on the main question, to return to that, I do not end in doubt. There are various forms of identity in diversity, not logically derivable from one another, and yet all instances and developments of one underlying principle. The idea that mere ‘existence’ could be anything, or could make anything the same or different, seems a sheer superstition. All is not quality in the special sense of quality, but all is quality in the sense of content and character. The search for a ‘that’ other than a ‘what’ is the pursuit of a phantasm which recedes the more the more you approach it. But even this phantasm is the illusory show of a truth. For in the Absolute there is no ‘what’ divorced from and re-seeking its ‘that,’ but both these aspects are inseparable.
III. I think it right to add here some remarks on Resemblance, though on this point I have little or nothing new to say. Resemblance or Similarity or Likeness, in the strict sense of the term, I take to be the perception of the more or less unspecified
- ↑ The question, Has all distinction a temporal or spatial character? does not mean here, Have the only distinctions we can make, or the earliest distinctions we come to make, such a character in themselves for us and as distinct? This question I should answer without hesitation in the negative. The question as to which I am in doubt concerns not directly the object to which we attend, but the psychical machinery of distinction which we do not notice, but which I at least assume must be there and must in some sense qualify the object. There are some remarks on space as the one ground of distinction in Mind, N.S. No. 14, pp. 232-3. The case for space is, so far as I understand it, anything but strong.
