Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/222

 '208 BERNABD BOSANQUET : or persisting in a single content. The former is such as the power of a machine to do certain work, the latter is such as the colour it is painted. It is true that each can be stated in a single phrase, and thought of, up to a certain point, in isolation from the machine as a whole. But the former cannot be truly thought of in this way, that is, if so thought of, it cannot be understood ; while the latter loses little if anything by being thought of in isolation. Identities of the former type I should naturally call concrete, and only those of the latter type abstract. It may be only my King Charles' head, but I almost suspect that a tacit confusion between identity and similarity is here playing us a trick. A true concrete identity is based on differentiation, and is curtailed by abstraction, qua identity, in the same ratio in which the differentiation itself is so curtailed. Now a consciousness, even a consciousness in time, in
 * so far as it realises a degree of perfection or of the good-

will, is an identity of the former type. A consciousness of which we only know that it realises successive states of pleasure, need only contain an identity of the latter type. The former is held together by a unity touched only at its margin by succession. Its edges are washed by time, but its own elements are not in succession to one another. The latter, for all we know, may be a succession having in common almost no assignable element of unity at all. We really can say hardly anything as to the minimum conditions involved in a succession of pleasant states. But we can say, I think, that taken at any two points of the succession it need exhibit no tendency whatever to grow towards totality. The old criticism remains therefore unassailable, that the hundredth pleasant state need find us in possession of no more pleasure than the first. With perfection or the good will this is not so. The accidents of life may frustrate their development ; but in so far as they display their nature and this is surely the case we ought in fairness to consider they involve a certain structure of the mind and character, of a logical type which necessitates an appreciable achieve- ment of harmonious structure, and a progress in the same direction. It may be urged that succession in time is a false appear- ance, and that in the reality the vanished states of pleasure cannot be lost, but must be gathered up as parts of the timeless whole. But granting this reply to be just, it comes equally to the aid of the good-will in respect of the successiveness which attaches to its realisation in time. Only, whereas in the case