take to show you the sense in which, in respect to this same character, they also agree. I inevitably note, then, if I look closer, the “common nature” of ɑ and b. Of course I can never, in any realistic sense, so abstract this “common nature” as to make it appear by itself as an object existing independently of their difference. Yet it is there, and arouses my interest. Otherwise I should not be comparing ɑ and b. They, as they come to me, appear as specifications of this “common nature.”
Now when I view them as such specifications, the problem of the One and the Many arises afresh. How can this One Nature be the same in these two? This ancient question is here a question of fact. It is a question about what I actually observe when I discriminate. As it comes to me, it is already a question about a Triad, not as yet of objects, but of aspects of the whole situation before me. There is an unity here. There is also the diversity of these two objects; and this unity is not something merely glued to this diversity in an external way. The situation is this: That a certain One (viz. the “common nature” of these two objects) is observed, not as something over and above these two, but as in them, — as their nature, diversified into their differences. Yet this one is itself, nevertheless, contrasted with these two; for neither of the two, ɑ or b, is by itself the other member of the pair; while the “common nature” is expressed in them both. How this can be, I so far am led to inquire. But that this is so, the discrimination implies. Here, then, I have one of those “bare external conjunctions” of the One and the Many of which Mr. Bradley, in his Appearance and Reality
