Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/170

156 J. ELLIS MCTAGGAET : many individuals has this quality which is denied to the single unity, this, it may be said, reduces the unity to a comparative unreality. All the reality is transferred to the separate individuals, who are each centres of cognition, and the unity falls back into the position of a mere aggregate, or, at the most, of a mechanically determined whole. If this were the case, we should certainly have gone wrong. We learnt in the category of Life (or indeed, before that, in Teleology) that the unity must be as real as the individuals. And, so far from dropping this in reaching Cognition, the reason that we passed on to Cognition was that in no other way could the full reality of the unity be made compatible with the full reality of the individuals. If, therefore, the denial that the individuals existed for the unity, subordinated the unity to the individuals, and involved an atomistic view, the position would have to be changed somehow. But I believe that it does nothing of the sort, and that, on the contrary, it is the objection to it which implies an atomistic theory, and is therefore invalid. A system of individuals of which each is conscious of the other (to go back to a concrete example of the category) is of course differentiated. Each of the conscious beings is an individual, and stands out, by that, separate from the others. But they are just as much united as they are separated. For A can only be conscious of B in so far as they are united, and it is only, in such a system, by being conscious of B that A is an individual, or, indeed, exists at all. Common sense, however, clings by preference to the categories of Essence, and is consequently atomistic. To common sense, therefore, such a system is more thoroughly differentiated than it is united. But the dialectic has proved this to be a mistake. It has shown that in such a system the unity is as real as the differentiation, and it is only to an objector who ignores this that a system bound together by the mutual knowledge of its parts can be reproached with being atomistic. To think that the unity of the system would be intensified by the individuals being for that unity is a mistake. It is true that each individual is also, in one sense of the word, a unity, and that the unity of the system is for each individual. But the sense in which an individual, that gets all differen- tiation from without, is a unity, is entirely different from, the unity of the system. This has nothing outside to which it can be related, and it gets all its differentiation from within from the individuals composing it. Such a difference in the nature of the two unities prevents us from arguing that they ought to unify their differentiations in the same way.