Page:Knowing and acting.djvu/14

 such unity in what we call the individual mind, or at best only a forecast and analogue of such unity. Yet qua philosopher he is confident that in all the variety of mental life there is a unity, giving being and intelligibility to all the differences that genuinely exist and therefore must be acknowledged. But the differents must be different—really and genuinely different, and not merely seem so, nor is there any obligation to accept in regard to them the first deliverances of this or that casual observer.

But how, it may be asked, are we to get at this unity? How especially are we to be sure that what we arrive at is not simply the empirical self of you or me, already discredited as a mere pretender to be the unity of which we are in search? The answer is, by Reflexion. This is a mere word, but I believe it to stand for a genuine idea. Here I can only say what it is not: it is not observation or 'introspection' or any operation known to or practised by the sciences. It is the special method, or rather act, of Philosophy. In performing it the mind ceases to be this or that mind, it becomes and finds itself as Mind universal: it discovers not my mind, or mind 'in general', not a mutilated individual, nor 'an arbitrary complex of mutilated individuals', but Mind Individual and Universal, single and integrate, that of which your mind and mine are isolated and distracted fragments, yet at the same time parts and tributaries, and as such participants in its nature and similar to it in structure.

That Reality, as well within us as without, should present differences is to the philosopher matter neither for surprise nor for regret. He is not dismayed by the extent and variety of these differences, or by the fact that the very differences themselves differ inter se, in amount, degree, kind, &c. There are differents and differences, and not