Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/38

 of presentations seem [sic] to me to be fraudulently attacked, what comes to me as something not to be reasoned away is in a word the life of mind; or, if we prefer the old technical language, its explicit unity. Well, it may be said, but a bar of iron has unity, and you will not say that this is a character inherently connecting it with your consciousness. No, I should not say that is so, directly and with reference to my single consciousness. But then in the case of the bar of iron I can say—or if I cannot, a physicist can—what else is meant by this unity, in what relations it lies, and on what characters it depends. And it is, we then see, not an explicit unity; not one which states itself. But now come to a content of sense. What I see when I look at a blue thing has unity, and life. Its parts that is, though varied, confirm, support and determine one another by explicit "compresence." It pulsates with feeling, a common tone, which involves the presence of a whole all at once, reinforcing and modifying every part by the simultaneous effects of all. What does a unity of this kind consist in? Identity