Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/546

 532 B. RUSSELL: therefore, that no grounds whatever should have been alleged in favour of this view, except that to Mr. Joachim the opposite appears inconceivable. The curious and discouraging thing about this dispute is, that conversely I cannot see what the ' problem ' is which I am supposed to be merely re-stating. That the same man, in the strictest sense of the word 'same,' should be both the son of one man and the brother of another, or that he should be the brother of two men, or that greenness should have a resemblance to blueness and also to yellowness such facts do not seem to me to call for any explana- tion. The demand for an explanation seems to depend upon some supposed law of sufficient reason upon the notion that everything must have a reason for being as it is and not otherwise. Such a view can be supported by theism or by any teleological philosophy, though even then it is difficult to assign a sufficient reason for God. But apart from some such assumption, I cannot see why we should expect a reason for everything. And in spite of many efforts, I cannot understand why it should be thought that relatedness implies complexity ; and, unfortunately, Mr. Joachim, though he holds that there is a reason for everything, does not offer any reason for his opinion about relations. The arguments in the pages we have been considering are, there- fore, such as will only appear cogent to those who already admit the conclusions which the arguments are intended to prove. This leads to the further question : What arguments, on such a question, are conceivable, which do not assume the question already decided ? I think the only possible argument of this kind, on all fundamental questions, is some form or other of the reductio ad absurdum. That is to say, a position can be refuted in the eyes of one who previously held it if, assuming it to be true, and using only inferences of a kind which it admits to be valid, the falsehood of some essential part of the position can be deduced. This, of course, assumes that whatever implies its own falsehood must be false ; but this assump- tion is made by all philosophers. The Hegelian dialectic is in part an argument of this nature : the inadequacy of the thesis is shown by the fact that it implies the antithesis, which is inconsistent with it. Mr. Joachim himself supplies an argument of this type, by showing that, if coherence (in his sense) is the essence of truth, then it cannot be quite true that coherence (in his sense) is the essence of truth. And if he had intended to refute the view of truth advocated by Mr. Moore and myself, it would have been necessary to accept it provisionally, and to have shown that it led to consequences inconsistent with itself. This method is, of course, difficult, because it is difficult to realise the position of an adversary so clearly as to be able to avoid assumptions which he rejects. And as against Hegelianism, at least in a form which it frequently Assumes among its disciples, the method seems essentially incapable jjjf employment. For wherever a contradiction is demonstrated, the 3gefian has only to raise an altar " to the Unknown Synthesis,"