Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/172

 156 L. T. HOBHOUSE : and the resulting resemblances are distinguishable elements, any one of which may form the main contribution of the conception to any Thought into which it enters. 1 In a very general and abstract sense, the account we have given of the abstract quality will also apply to the organic principle. This principle also bears reference to Reality as similarly qualified in an indefinite number of cases. But this is an inadequate account. To say that the fire is alight is to say something complete in itself, to bring out a net result. To say of a curve that it is of the second degree, or of a physical substance that it is an organism, may rather be said to be setting a question than answering one. For any intelligent learner the questions, w y hat sort of curve? what kind of organism ? naturally arise. This follows quite logically from the nature of the case. The content now before us is not something readily realised and identical in all cases. It is something demanding further determination, and varying in character according to the determination which it receives. When a content of this kind is predicated the judgment is categorical only in so far as it brings the subject decisively within certain limits, and as certain elements of the predicate are of the definite and unchanging kind. In this case there- fore the universal tends to the form of a disjunctive system. It stands for that character of Reality A, which modified by a appears as a, by /8 as b, and so on. We should not identify the element of generality with the system as such. It is still the aspect of similarity which makes the content general. But we should say that the system is one in which the general and particular are taken as distinguishable but inseparable. 2 1 A. rather common and seductive fallacy arises from the neglect to distinguish these elements. A quality is called a ' universal ' when it forms the nucleus of a general content in the way above described ; and the other elements requisite for generality are omitted from consideration, or, worse still, are sometimes inserted, and then again omitted, as the exigencies of any given argument may require. To take only one instance, we are told that of the individual nothing can be known but what is general. The only ground for such a statement is that the qualities assignable to an individual must be expressible in general terms, and therefore points in which it is similar to others. But a thing doea not lose individuality by entering into relations. The argument proceeds as though individuality and generality were mutually exclusive qualities, one of which a thing might possess but not both, instead of being expressions for the resemblances and distinctions between things of which the latter invariably implies the former. 2 The concrete individual presents us with this union in actual fact, and this made Hegel take it as the highest phase of the concept as such " In der Einzelnheit ist jenes wahre Verhaltniss, die Untrennbarkeit der