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 relations, supersedes and still includes them. Hence in the Absolute, where all is complete, we are bound to hold that every development reaches its end—whatever that end may be, and in whatever sense we are to say the thing comes to it. The goal of every progress therefore may be taken as already attained in Reality and as now present and actual. I do not mean that without exception all immediate sameness must pass through the relational consciousness. But without exception no sameness reaches its truth and final reality except in the Whole which is beyond relations and which carries out what they attempt. And in the main the way of relations is the necessary mode of progress from that which is incomplete to its perfection. All sameness then not only may but must become relational, or at least must be realized in the same end and on the same principle as would have perfected it if it had passed through relational identity. And because in the Absolute what must be is, I think that, wherever there is identity, we may speak of a relation—so long of course as we are clear about the sense in which we speak of it.

And this is how and why, in thinking, I can find the relations that I make. For what I develop is in the Absolute already complete. But this, on the other hand, does not mean that my part in the affair is irrelevant, that it makes no difference to truth and is external. To be made and to be found is on the contrary essential to the development and being of the thing, and truth in its processes and results belongs to the essence of reality. Only, here as everywhere, we must distinguish between what is internally necessary and what is contingent. It belongs to the essence of sameness that it should go on to be thought and to be thought in a certain way. But that it should be thought by you and not by me, by a man with brown hair or with red, does not belong to its essence. These features in a sense qualify it, for they are conjoined to it, and no conjunction can in the end be a mere conjunction and be barely external. But the connection here is so indirect and so little individual, it involves so much of other conditions lying in the general background, so much the introduction of which would by addition tend to transform and swamp this particular truth and fact as such—that such features are rightly called external and contingent. But contingency is of course always a matter of degree.

This leads to the question whether and how far Resemblance qualifies the real. Resemblance is the perception or feeling of a more or less unspecified partial identity; and, so far as the identity is concerned, we have therefore already dealt with it. But taking resemblance not as partial identity but as a mode in which identity may appear, how are we to say that it belongs to reality? Certainly it belongs and must belong, and about