them and to examine their connexion. Perhaps we might term the one “material identity” and the other “individual identity”—following the analogy of expressions such as “different things but all made of the same stuff,” “the same person but entirely changed.” Thus there is unity and plurality concerned in both, and herein identity or sameness differs from singularity or mere oneness, which so far entails no relation. But the unity and the plurality are different in each, and each is in some sort the converse of the other. In the one, two different individuals partially coincide; in the other, one individual is partially different; the unity in the one case is an individual presentation, in the other is the presentation of an individual.
In material identity the unity is that of a single presentation, whether simple or complex, which enters as a common Material Identity. constituent into two or more others. It may be possible, of course, to individuahze it, but as it emerges in a comparison it is a single presentation and nothing more. On account of this absence of individual marks this single presentation is what logicians call “abstract”; but this is not psychologically essential. It may be a generic image which has resulted from the neutralization of individual marks, but it may equally well be a simple presentation, like red, to which such marks never belonged. We come here from a new side upon a truth which has been already expounded at length, viz. that presentations are not given to us as individuals but as changes in a continuum. Time and space—the instruments, as it were, of individualization, which are presupposed in the objective sciences—are psychologically later than this mere differentiation.
The many vexed questions that arise concerning individual identity are metaphysical rather than psychological. But it Individual Identity. will serve to bring out the difference between the two forms of identity to note that an identification cannot be established solely by qualitative comparison; an alibi or a breach of temporal continuity will turn the flank of the strongest argument from resemblance. Moreover, resemblance itself may be fatal to identification when the law of being is change.
41. As regards the real categories, it may be said generally that these owe their origin in large measure to the anthropomorphic Real Categories. or mythical tendency of human thought—τὸ ὅμοιον τῷ ὁμοίῳ γινώσκεσθαι. Into the formation of these conceptions two very distinct factors enter—(1) the facts of what in the stricter sense we call “self-consciousness,” and (2) certain spatial and temporal relations among our presentations themselves. On the one hand, it has to be noted that these spatial and temporal relations are but the occasion or motive—and ultimately perhaps, we may say, the warrant—for the analogical attribution to things of selfness, efficiency and design, but are not directly the source of the forms of thought that thus arise. On the other hand, it is to be noted also that such forms, although they have an independent source, would never apart from suitable material come into actual existence. If the followers of Hume err in their exclusive reliance upon “associations naturally and even necessarily generated by the order of our sensations” (J. S. Mill), the disciple of Kant errs also who relies exclusively on “the synthetic unity of apperception.” The truth is that we are on the verge of error in thus sharply distinguishing the two at all; if we do so momentarily for the purpose of exposition it behoves us here again to remember that mind grows and is not made. The use of terms like “innate,” “a priori,” “necessary,” “formal,” &c., without further qualification leads only too easily to the mistaken notion that all the mental facts so named are alike underived and original, independent not only of experience but of each other; whereas but for the forms of intuition the forms of thought would be impossible—that is to say, we should never have a self-consciousness at all if we had not previously learnt to distinguish occupied and unoccupied space, past and present in time, and the like. But, again, it is equally true that, if we could not feel and move as well as receive impressions, and if experience did not repeat itself, we should never attain even to this level of spatial and temporal intuition. Kant shows a very lame and halting recognition of this dependence of the higher forms on the lower both in his schematism of the categories, and again in correcting in his Analytic the opposition of sense and understanding as respectively receptive and active with which he set out in his Aesthetic. Still, although what are called the subjective and objective factors of real knowledge advance together, the former is in a sense always a step ahead. We find again without us the permanence, individuality, efficiency, and adaptation we have found first of all within (cf. § 20, b and d). But such primitive imputation of personality, 'though it facilitates a first understanding, soon proves itself faulty and begets the contradictions which have been one chief motive to philosophy. We smile at the savage who thinks a magnet must need food or the child who is puzzled that the horses in a picture remain for ever still; but few consider that underlying all common-sense thinking there lurks the same natural precipitancy. We attribute to extended things a unity which we know only as the unity of an unextended subject; we attribute to changes among these extended things what we know only when we act and suffer ourselves; and we attribute further to them in their changes a striving for ends which we know only because we feel. In asking what they are, how they act, and why they are thus and thus, we assimilate them to ourselves, in spite of the differences which lead us by-and-by to see a gulf between mind and matter. Such instinctive analogies have, like other analogies, to be confirmed, refuted, or modified by further knowledge, i.e. by the very insight into things which these analogies have themselves made possible. That in their first form they were mythical, and that they could never have been at all unless originated in this way, are considerations that make no difference to their validity—assuming, that is, that they admit, now or hereafter, of a logical transformation which renders them objectively valid. This legitimation is, of course, the business of philosophy; we are concerned only with the psychological analysis and origin of the conceptions themselves.
42. As it must here suffice to examine one of these categories; let us take that which is the most important and central of the Causality. three, viz. causality or the relation of cause and effect, as that will necessarily throw some light upon the constitution of the others. To begin, we must distinguish three things, which, though very different, are very liable to be confused. (1) Perceiving in a definite case, e.g. that on the sun shining a stone becomes warm, we may say the sun makes the stone warm. This is a concrete instance of predicating the causal relation. In this there is, explicitly at all events, no statement of a general law or axiom, such as we have when we say (2) “Every event must have a cause”—a statement commonly known as the principle of causality. This again is distinct from what is on all hands allowed to be an empirical generalization, viz. (3) that such and such particular causes have invariably such and such particular effects. With these last psychology is not directly concerned at all: it has only to analyse and trace to its origin the bare conception of causation as expressed in (1) and involved in both these generalizations. Whether only some events have causes, as the notion of chance implies, whether all causes are uniform in their action or some capricious and arbitrary, as the unreflecting suppose—all this is beside the question for us.
One point in the analysis of the causal relation Hume may be said to have settled once for all: it does not rest upon or contain any immediate intuition of a causal nexus. The two relations that Hume allowed to be perceived (or “presumed to exist”), viz. contiguity in space of the objects causally related and priority in time of the cause before the effect, are the only relations directly discernible. We say indeed “The sun warms the stone” as readily as we say “The sun rises and sets,” as if both were matters of direct observation then and there. But that this is not so is evident from the fact that only in some cases when one change follows upon another do we regard it as following from the other: casual coincidence is at least as common as causal connexion. Whence the difference, then, if not from perception? Hume's answer,[1] repeated in the main by English psychologists since, is, as all the world knows, that the difference is the result of association, that when a change α in an object A has been frequently observed to precede a change β in another object B, this repetition determines the mind to a transition from the one to the other. It is this
- ↑ Treatise of Human Nature, pt. iii. § xiv., “of the idea of necessary connexion.”
