Mind Association

Mr. Bradley on Immediate Resemblance Author(s): William James Source: Mind, New Series, Vol. 2, No. 6 (Apr., 1893), pp. 208-210 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2247958 Accessed: 19/01/2009 09:47
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V.-DISCUSSIONS.
MR. BRADLEY ON IMMEDIATE RESEMBLANCE.

My agreement with Mr. Bradley that " the issue involved is one of very great and wide-reaching importance" must be my
excuse for sending a word of comment on his paper in the

January MIND. The text of his criticism is furnished by pp. 490-4, and 532-3 of vol. i. of my work The Prinoiples of Psychology, and the exact question is this: Is the 'resemblance' which we predicate of two objects due in the last resort always to the operations on our mind of qualitatively identical elements contained in each? Or, may we, on the other hand, admit the existence, amongst our mind's objects, of qualities or natures
which have no definite ' point' in common, but which we perceive to be, although numerically distinct, yet like each other in various

degrees and ways ? We so often discover later the exact point of resemblance in two composite objects which first struck us by their likeness as vague wholes, and we are so often able to name
it as an identical portion in both, that the temptation to

generalise lies very near; and we then say that there can
nowhere be natures immediately like or unlike each other, and

that every case of so-called similarity, even the simplest, must constitute a problem in analysis, which a higher discernment might solve. But since the higher discernment., methodically abandoned to this analytic quest, ought not to stop at any elements of which resemblance is simply affirmed(for the ' point' of this resemblance must then also be sought), it is obvious that the problem can only lead to one of two conclusions, either to (1) The postulation of point after point, encapsulated within each other in infinitum, as the constitutive condition of the resemblance of any two objects; or to (2) A last kind of element (if one could then say 'kind') of
whose self-compoundings all the objects, and of whose diverse ,numbers in the objects, all the likeness and unlikeness in the

world are made. Of these two views of resemblance the former leads to a sort of Leibnitzian metaphysics, and the latter to what I call the
Mind-dust theory.

My solution, or rather Stumpf's (for in my book I am but the humble follower of the eminent Munich psychologist), was to take neither of these objectionable alternatives, but (challenging the hasty hypothesis that composition must explain all) to admit (3) That the last elements of things may differ variously, and that their 'kinds' and bare unmediated resemblances and contrasts may be ultimate data of our world as well as provisional categories of our perception.

MR. BRADLEY ON IMMEDIATE RESEMBLANCE.

209

Mr. Bradley is dissatisfied both with this thesis,' and with the arguments given in my book to support it. I care much more about the thesis than about the arguments, so I will spare the reader all cavil at my critic's treatment of the latter. In particular I abandon the series-business to his mercy, as being something inessential, for I am much more concerned with furthering understanding of the subject than with defending my own text.2 As regards the thesis itself, Mr. f3radley quarrels greatly with the simplicity of the elements between which in the last resort it contends that bare unmediated resemblance may obtain. I did, it is true, assume in my' text that the elements were simple, and I called them simple qualities, but I regard that as an entirely inessential point. So far as my thesis stands up for ultimate unmediated likeness as against likeness dependent on partially identical content, it makes no difference whether the last elements assumed to be like, are simple or complex. They must only not contain any identical point. In other words, complexes like abc and def might resemble each other by principle (3) as well as simple elements like a and b. This clears up one confusion. But dire confusion still remains in my mind as to the rest of what Mr. Bradley may mean. He has a solution of his own which is like neither (1), (2), nor (3) as propounded above. He alludes to it abundantly, but dispenses himself from stating it articulately, or illustrating it by any example, because it proceeds from a principle which he imagines to be 'the common property of philosophic students'. Such oracular expression of opinion might fairly exempt one from the duty of nearer research, but the great debt I owe to Mr. Bradley's Logic makes me struggle in the hope of yet finding valuable truth. Mr. Bradley appears to hold that all likeness must be ' in and least he says so on page 85. through a particular point'-at Now call the ' point' m, and the two like objects a and b. If the m in a were simply like the mn b, that would be that simple in resemblance over again with which Mr. Bradley is not content. But if we suppose the two m's to be alike by virtue of another ' point,' finer still, that leads to infinite regress; and that again I understand Mr. Bradley not to favour. It then would remain open to say that the two m's in a and b are identical in nature
'Or have I made a gross blunder, and is he dissatisfied really not with 'simple resemblance' but only with ' resemblance between simples,' on which, as I presently explain, I do not insist? 2 One misapprehension, however, I may complain of. Mr. Bradley seems to accuse me of believing that the ' points of resemblance' which form the ground of similarity must be ' separable' parts of the similar parts are all that the argument requires ; and I surely things. Discernible never implied that the 'points' in question must be susceptible of physical isolation. The accusation is so absurd that I fear I have not understood Mr. Bradley's text.

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W. JAMES:

IMMEDIATE RESEMBL.ANCE.

and only numerically distinct. But here again pure identity displeases Mr. Bradley, whose great principle is that " our one chance lies in maintaining the vital, the inseparable connexion at every point between identity and difference'" (bottom of p. 88). Just how this principle works in the matter in question, Mr. Bradley does not divulge, and I wish that, instead of his pleasant irony about my familiarity with the dialectical method, he had himself given some exacter' account. I have laboured with the greatest good-will to reconstruct his thought, but feel wholly at sea with my results. If he means simply the Hegelian commonplace that whereas neither the abstract sameness nor the abstract otherness of two objects can constitute likeness between them, the likeness must seek in the ' synthesis' of the sameness with the otherness its only possible mode of realisation, that seems to me but an excessively clumsy way of stating in terms of a quasimiracle the very truth which Stumpf and I express by saying that likeness is an immediately ascertained relation. You cannot for ever analytically exhibit its ground, but must somewhere at last postulate it as there, as having already effected itself, you know not how. Nothing is gained for our understanding by presenting the process as a sort of juggler's trick, that, namely, of the seemingly impossible coalescence, of two contradictoryterms; and therefore I cannot believe that the subtle Mr. Bradley has anything as innocent as that in his mind. Perhaps what I write may draw him from his reserve! Of course there is a familiar path open to those who believe that likeness must be 'in and through a particular point,' and who yet deny that the 'point' can be in two objects the same. They can call likeness an 'Antinomy '; saying that all likeness of wholes is conditioned on that of their metaphysical parts, and that unconditionally like parts are unattainable, however long one may seek. But this leaves both immediate' likeness and apparent identity as ever-recurring categories in our thinking, never to be expelled from our empirical world, and I submit that Mr. Bradley has not yet shown these categories to be absurd. 'Antinomies' should surely not be multiplied beyond necessity. The qualities of the things of this world, the ' terms' between which likenesses and differences obtain, are not supposed to be engendered by the summation of a procession of still more inward qualities involved within each other in infinite regression, like the whirls of an endlessly converging spiral that never reaches its central point. Why need we insist that the ' relations ' between the terms, the likenesses and differences themselves, must be engendered by such an impossible summation or synthesis ? How quality logically makes itself, we do not know; and we know no more in the case of the quality of a relation of likeness, than in that of the quality of a sensational content.
WILLIAM JAMES.