Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 4.djvu/359

 is not the change of something, an individual which does not act, and an act which is not that of an individual, are alike incomprehensible. This applies to every sphere of our knowledge. A thing is one and its special qualities are many, or it is permanent, — one in that sense, — and its changes are many; any event which we take as such is an abstraction from the continuity of all happening; it is one of the discrete points in the continuous change of the universe, yet the discreteness is as essential as the continuity. It is not merely that discrete and continuous are relative terms, the one presupposing the other, and the two, in Hegelian phrase, melting into a higher unity. The discrete and the continuous are just given together, and we must take them so; they are given to us as different aspects of the same reality. Not merely again as our finite way of looking at what is neither continuous nor discrete, but something higher than both; the very attempt to think such an “Identity” repels us, and inevitably leads to failure. Unless we are to distrust perception and thought altogether, to give up thinking about the real at all, then we must accept this doublesidedness of reality as ultimate. So a ‘thing’ seems on the one hand to possess a unity, in virtue of which it is that particular thing and not another, but this unity we cannot describe further, nor identify with any particular quality or relation of the thing or its parts; on the other hand, a thing has many qualities, relations to other things, relations of its qualities to one another, and accordingly many ways of acting and reacting upon other things. All this series we may know, and the knowledge constitutes our knowledge of the thing, but no one of them, nor all put together is the thing, which seems obstinately to conceal itself from our view, to remain a substratum, an obscure ‘something’ behind them all. Yet our knowledge of it only grows through knowledge of its (qualities, relations, ways of acting; we can have no hope of knowing it as something different from and beside all these, nor, paradoxical as it may seem, is it anything other than these. Knowledge of the thing in itself, in this sense, we have none; the unity we speak of, taken by itself, is a mere term: we cannot know anything as a unity unless we have something to unite, that is, unless we know that of which it is the unity. On the other hand, the particulars alone give us no knowledge of the thing, otherwise we could make no distinction of one thing from others, could make no distinctions at all in our knowledge except that of one merest particular from another. Even this we could not do, for it is only in virtue of a unity that we distinguish at all, — between two colours for example by their underlying identity.

The same result will be gained if we go higher in the scale,