sameness but only likeness. And with this, so far as I can see, there is an end of argument. I can myself understand such an attitude only as the result of an unconscious determination to deny a doctrine from fear of its consequences.
But if we are to look at consequences—and I am ready to look at them—why should we be blind on one side? To avoid confusion between what may be called individual sameness and mere identity of character, we should of course all agree, is most desirable. But the idea that you will avoid a mistake by making an error, that you will prevent a confusion between different kinds of identity by altogether denying one kind, seems to me to be irrational. The identity that you deny will in practice come back always. It may return in a form genuine but disguised, obscured and distorted by the deceptive title of exact likeness. But on the other hand it may steal in as an illusive and disastrous error. And we need not seek far to find an instructive illustration of this. J. S. Mill may be called, I presume, the leader of those who amongst us deny identity of quality, and J. S. Mill on the other hand taught Association by Similarity. At least we must say this until it has been proved here—as elsewhere with regard to the argument from particulars—that we who criticise Mill know no more of his real meaning than in fact Mill himself did. And Association by Similarity, as taught by Mill and his school, entails (as I have proved in my Principles of Logic) and really asserts the coarsest mythology of individual Resurrection. And I do not think that the history of philosophy can exhibit a grosser case of this very confusion against which we who believe in identity are so specially warned. Yes, you may try to drive out nature, and nature (as the saying goes) will always come back, but it will not always come back as nature. And you may strive to banish identity of character, and identity always will return, and it will not always return in a tolerable form. The cardinal importance of the subject must be my excuse for the great length of this Note, and for my once more taking up a controversy which gives me no pleasure, but which I feel I have no right to decline.
