Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/150

Rh then some part of the part, some aspect of the aspect, must be really and ultimately quite the same. Name me any feature whatever in one of these two beings, — any character sensuous or supersensuous of which you will say: It is a common feature, really the same in these two beings. Then in my turn I will show you that just that feature is not the same, for I will suppose one of the two objects destroyed, as by hypothesis I have a right to do. I will then find the other in all its features quite unchanged, as by hypothesis I can do. And so I will show that what was destroyed in the one object cannot be the same as what survives unchanged in the other, precisely as the survivors of a shipwreck cannot be the same as the drowned. All this, you must remember, I assert upon the one basis of the realistic hypothesis about the many independent beings as stated above.

It follows that, as was to be proved, the many entities of this realistic world have no features in common. If they appear to have, this is seeming, is “mere name and form,” as the Hindoo philosophers would say. In brief, such sameness is not at all real. The appearance called “similarity” has no real basis except when we are dealing with the aspects or functions that may exist within what our present arbitrary definition would call a single real being.

I sum up the results of these two inquiries concerning the world of the many independent reals by asserting simply: The real beings, if in the present sense many, namely, if real beings thus logically independent of one another, have no common features, no ties, no true relations; they are sundered from one another by absolutely impassable chasms; they can never come to get either ties