Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/170

 154 ' L. T. HOBHOUSE : large and even to humanity as a whole. This spirit is an actual force operating in the minds of men and women. It is a living desire or purpose and proves its independence in this, that it survives failure and actively searches for new forms of expression. And it is the more worth while to insist on this because in the various movements, political and in- dustrial, which it animates, it is more or less alloyed with other motives. The differences here are not merely developments of the general conception. The principle may be lost in detail or marred by its contact with grosser realities. In fact in such a case we are between Scylla and Charybdis. There is a fallacy of the abstract on one side and a fallacy of the concrete on the other. In the one case the principle remains an empty aspiration, a pious formula. In the other it is dissolved in the detail of organisation and machinery. There is an abstract practicality as well as an abstract theorising. On the other hand the element of identity may, seemingly, disappear altogether, and we may have a very well marked system of contents neither exactly alike nor capable of being represented as differentiations of a common quality. This I imagine to be the case with colour. We cannot represent the different colours as modifications of a common colour quality, but only as different combinations of two or three tints. Here the concept falls back upon a quality which is no longer identical in all cases, but only more or less alike ; and it is only so far as the limits of variation are known that it can be said to retain any definiteness of character. IV. The Concept in Knowledge. We may now bring our two cases together and consider the results for the general theory of the concept. In the first case then we have a quality existing unchanged in many instances and in diverse contexts. It is only one attribute (or complex of attributes) of the reality to which it belongs and it cannot exist except in conjunction with other attributes. But these attributes do not modify it. They are to be regarded as being along with it attributes of or elements in the whole which they form. They are not attributes or modifications of the quality itself. In the second case the attributes along with which the common quality is given are in fact modifications of the quality itself. As between one case and another the resemblance is not complete but partial, and if we wish adequately to express the reality we cannot always separate the point of resemblance from the point of difference and throw them into contrast with one another. In any case, the generic element and its specific modifications are so