some other reason admissible, but as expressing a principle—strikes my mind as surprising. It is to me much as if a man asserted baldly, ‘Because it is here now, therefore it will be there then,’ and declared that no further reason either was or ought to be wanted. And that mere ‘existence’ should be a reason for anything seems difficult to conceive, even if we suppose (as we cannot) that mere existence is itself anything but a false, self-contradictory, and in the end meaningless abstraction.
But the true reason why we judge that anything will continue (whenever and wherever we so judge) is radically different. It is an inference based not on ‘existence’ but on ideal synthesis of content, and it concludes to and from an identity not of ‘existence’ but character. It rests in a word upon the Principle of Ideal Identity. If a thing is connected with my world now, and if I assume that my world otherwise goes on, I must apart from other reasons conclude that the thing will be there. For otherwise the synthesis of content would be both true and false. And, if in my world are certain truths of succession, then another mere context cannot make them false, and hence, apart from some reason to the contrary, the succession A-B-C must infallibly repeat itself, if there is given at any time either A or A-B. This is how through ideal identity we rationally judge and conclude to continuance, and to judge otherwise to my mind is wholly irrational. And I have ventured to dwell on this point because of the light it seems to throw on the consequences which may follow, when, rejecting the true principle of identity, we consciously or unconsciously set up in its place the chimaera of identity of mere existence.
I will add that, so far as we take the whole state of the world at any one moment as causally producing the whole state of the world at the next moment, we do so rationally only so far as we rest the succession on a connection of content, and because otherwise this connection would not be a true one, as we have taken it to be. We can only however make use of the above idea in the end on sufferance. For the state of the world would not really be self-contained, nor could the connection really in the end be intelligible. And again to take any temporal process in the Absolute as the Absolute’s own process would be a fundamental error.
I will append to this Note a warning about the Principle of Ideal Identity. This principle does not of course guarantee the original truth or intelligibility of a synthesis, and it is a very serious misunderstanding to take it as used in this sense. It merely insists that any truth, because not existence, is therefore true everywhere in existence and through all changes of context. For Identity see further Notes B and C.
