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Page:Ethical Studies (reprint 1911).djvu/160

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while we yet maintain the previous dogma, ‘resemblance’ is brought in,—a conception which (I suppose I need not add) is not analyzed or properly defined, and so does all the better. Against these assertions I shall put some others, viz. that identity and diversity, sameness and difference, imply one another, and depend for their meaning on one another; that mere diversity is nonsense, just as mere identity is also nonsense; that resemblance or likeness, strictly speaking, falls not in the objects, but in the person contemplating (likening, ver-gleichend); that ‘is A really like B?’ does not mean ‘does it seem like?’ It may mean ‘would it seem like to everybody?’ but it generally means ‘is there an “objective identity”? Is there a point or points the same in both, whether any one sees it or not?’ We do not talk of cases of ‘mistaken likeness;’ we do not hang one man because he is ‘exactly like’ another, or at least we do not wish to do so. We are the same as we were, not merely more or less like. We have the same faith, hope, and purpose, and the same feelings as another man has now, as ourselves had at another time,—not understanding thereby the numerical indistinguishedness of particular states and moments, but calling the feelings one and the same feeling, because what is felt is the same, and not merely like. In short, so far is it from being true that ‘sameness’ is really ‘likeness,’ that it is utterly false that two things are really and objectively ‘like,’ unless that means ‘more or less the same.’ So much by way of counter-assertion; and now let us turn to our facts.

The ‘individual’ man, the man into whose essence his community with others does not enter, who does not include relation to others in his very being, is, we say, a fiction, and in the light of facts we have to examine him. Let us take him in the shape of an English child as soon as he is born; for I suppose we ought not to go further back. Let us take him as soon as he is separated from his mother, and occupies a space clear and exclusive of all other human beings. At this time, education and custom will, I imagine, be allowed to have not as yet operated on him or lessened his ‘individuality.’ But is he now a mere ‘individual,’ in the sense of not implying in his being identity with others? We can not say that, if we hold to the teaching of modern physiology. Physiology would tell us, in one language or another, that even