Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/391

 378 F. H. BRADLEY I presence of the other. Itself therefore, when one of these elements is banished, reacts, and bringing in the other produces a collision located in one point by a basis of identity. Again, if the two groups are there together, their identities, X(ai) 1, X(6) 2 , blend, and so force c and d to struggle for existence. It is this conflict of the soul against itself which begins to be felt as difference. The very lowest perception of change implies a basis of identity, with incompatible differences in and through which that struggles against itself, and so gets for a moment the feel- ing of relation. The same process, developing itself under special conditions, results in the perception of various rela- tions in which the two elements in their connexion come to consciousness at once. These special relations present us with a number of difficulties, made more difficult by the fact that our space-perception now qualifies and overlays the whole field. I can but emphasise in passing the essential point. There are no qualities which in themselves are in- compatible. They may be naturally incompatible in the sense that our machinery is not able to present us with both of them together, under some conditions or at all. 1 They are all again ideally incompatible, if we try simply to identify them (without blending) ; and all, on the other hand, recon- cilable, if we distantly couple them by means of relations. They are not really reconciled because the differences are all there, and the relations are not a harmony of these opposites, though they enable us to get round and to ignore the collision of unity and diversity. And if thought is a faculty of rela- tions, it is thus for ever condemned to inconsistency and makeshift. But what I would emphasise is this, that the one law of Individuation brings on the conflict, and then (practically though not theoretically) disposes of the problem by means of a relation. This is why ' contraries ' are most hostile, because the more special the identity the severer the struggle, if that struggle arises. But these forms of relation, which make experience what it is, are not (so far as I see) to be deduced from first principles. We are unable to reconstruct their specialities, though the necessity for them and their main character may be understood. And what we find everywhere, when elements are held apart and in rela- tion, is a basis of identity which ideally connects them even though that basis be not special and now appear to us no more than their co-presentment as members of one total given state of the feeling-centre. 1 I cannot enter here on the difficult question as to the part played by qua- lity as distinct from quantity. The view that in all presentations there is a common basis admitting of degrees would have considerable bearing here.