rest of the nation perished, that he would not survive. What we mean to say is, that he is what he is because he is a born and educated social being, and a member of an individual social organism; that if you make abstraction of all this, which is the same in him and in others, what you have left is not an Englishman, nor a man, but some I know not what residuum, which never has existed by itself, and does not so exist. If we suppose the world of relations, in which he was born and bred, never to have been, then we suppose the very essence of him not to be; if we take that away, we have taken him away; and hence he now is not an individual, in the sense of owing nothing to the sphere of relations in which he finds himself, but does contain those relations within himself as belonging to his very being; he is what he is, in brief, so far as he is what others also are.
But we shall be cut short here with an objection. ‘It is impossible,’ we shall be told, ‘that two men should have the same thing in common. You are confusing sameness and likeness.’ I say in answer that I am not, and that the too probable objector I am imagining too probably knows the meaning of neither one word nor the other. But this is a matter we do not intend to stay over, because it is a metaphysical question we can not discuss, and which, moreover, we can not be called on to discuss. We can not be called on to discuss it, because we have to do again here with sheer assertion, which either is ignorant of or ignores the critical investigation of the subject, and which, therefore, has no right to demand an answer. We allude to it merely because it has become a sort of catchword with ‘advanced thinkers.’ All that it comes to is this; first identity and diversity are assumed to exclude one another, and therefore, since diversity is a fact, it follows that there is no identity. Hence a difficulty; because it has been seen long ago, and forces itself upon every one, that denial of all identity brings you into sharp collision with ordinary fact, and leads to total scepticism[1]; so, to avoid this,
- ↑ Even from Mr. Mill (in controversy) we can quote, ‘If every general conception, instead of being “the One in the Many,” were considered to be as many different conceptions as there are things to which it is applicable, there would be no such thing as general language.’—Logic, i. 201, ed. vi.
