large? And, next, how does it become different in becoming the effect, and does it do so intelligibly? And if it does not become different, is there any sense in speaking of cause where there is no change? I will return to this point lower down.
(ii) With regard to Continuity (p. 61) the point is simple, and is of course the old difficulty urged once more. If cause is taken as a temporal existence and has a being in time, how can it have this unless it has some duration as itself? But, if it has duration, then after a period it must either pass into the effect for no reason, or else during the period it was not yet the cause, or else the temporal existence of the cause is split up into a series the elements of which, having no duration, do not temporally exist, or else you must predicate of the one cause a series of internal changes and call them its state—a course which, we found all along, could not be rationally justified in the sense of being made intelligible. It will of course be understood that these difficulties are merely speculative, and do not necessarily affect the question of how the cause is to be taken in practice.
(iii) I have really nothing to add in principle to the remark on Identity (p. 58), but I will append some detail. It seems to be suggested, e.g., that the mere existence of a temporal thing at one moment can be taken as the cause of its still continuing to exist at the next moment, and that such a self-determined Identity is intelligible in itself. To me on the contrary such an idea is inconsistent and in the end quite meaningless, and I will try to state the reason briefly. Identity in the first place (let me not weary of repeating this after Hegel) apart from and not qualified by diversity is not identity at all. So that without differences and qualification by differences this supposed thing would not be even the same, continue or endure at all. The idea that in time or in space there can be distinctions without any differences is to my mind quite unmeaning, and the assertion that anything can be successive in itself and yet merely the same, is to me an absurdity. Again to seek to place either the identity or the difference in mere ‘existence’ is, so far as I can see, quite futile—mere existence being once more a self-contradictory idea which ends in nonsense. This is all I need say as to the continued identity of a thing which does not change. But if it changes, then this thing becomes other than it was, and you have to make, and you cannot make, its alteration in the end intelligible. While, if you refuse to qualify the thing by the differences of succession, you once more contradict yourself by now removing the thing from out of temporal existence.
In the same way we may briefly dispose of the idea that a process may be intelligible up to a certain point, and may therefore be taken as the cause of its own continuance in
