Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/194

178 J. ELLIS MCTAGGART : Before anything can be said to have something else, it must itself be determined as being. Till it is real it cannot possess anything. And so if we are to say I has U, we must assign some reality to I other than U. Now, in the category of Thing and Properties this was possible. For the Thing was still conceived as an Essence to which the Properties were attached as appearance, but which had a reality in some way distinguishable from them. This distinction of Essence and Appearance, however, disappeared as we were dealing with Reciprocity. Our Individual is completely expressed by its Universals. It has nothing else in it. Where, then, are we to get the reality of which we can say that it has the Universal ? (We may notice in passing that, in the Doctrine of Being, things were their qualities, in the sense that the two were un- distinguishable. In Essence they had their qualities. Now, at the beginning of the Notion we find both terms in- applicable, and must wait for a deeper category which will allow them both to be true.) It is true that, although the Individual is completely expressed by Universals, it is never completely expressed by one Universal. Can we hope to find, in those Universals which we are not at that moment expressly predicating of the Individual, a reality which can be said to have the Uni- versal which we are then expressly affirming? Let the Individual before us, for example, be red, sweet, perishable, and beautiful. The Universal which we wish to predicate of it is red. W T e have seen that we may not say " This is red". Can we put, by means of the other Universals, sufficient meaning into the This to be able to say " This has redness"? Let us try to do so by considering the This as qualified by one more Universal for example, sweet. We are then in a dilemma. Either we say, when we undertake to define the Individual which is to have the redness, " This is sweet," or " This has sweetness ". The first we have already admitted we have no right to say. The second we can only say if the This which has sweetness is previously deter- mined. And in this way we should be committed to an Infinite Regress before we should be able to determine the Individual. a particular category in Essence. I have found it impossible to dispense with the use of " thing " in a more general sense, as indicating a centre of reality without regard to the particular category under which we may be contemplating it. I have therefore endeavoured to avoid ambiguity by always using a capital letter when referring to Hegel's category of Thing.