DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 493 



with all its difficulties in a particularly uncompromising 

 form ; and all for the sake of the fantastic pleasure of being 

 able arbitrarily to say that there is between the things in 

 the world and between the ' ideas ' in the mind nothing but 

 absolute sameness and absolute not-sameness of elements, 

 the not-sameness admitting no degrees. 



To me it seems much wiser to turn away from such 

 transcendental extravagances of speculation, and to abide 

 by the natural appearances. These would leave unlikeness 

 as an indecomposable relation amongst things, and a rela- 

 tion moreover of which there were all degrees. Absolute 

 not-sameness would be the maximal degree, absolute same- 

 ness the minimal degree of this unlikeness, the discernment 

 of which would be one of our ultimate cognitive powers.* 

 Certainly the natural appearances are dead against the notion 

 that no qualitative differences exist. With the same clear- 

 ness with which, in certain objects, we do feel a difference to 

 be a mere matter oi plus and minus, in other objects we feel 

 that this is not the case. Contrast our feeling of the differ- 

 ence between the length of two lines with our feeling of the 

 difference between blue and yellow, or with that between 

 right and left. Is right equal to left with something added ? 

 Is blue yellow plus something ? If so, plus what ?t So 

 long as we stick to verifiahle psychology, ive are forced to 

 admit that diff^erences of simple kind form an irreducible sort 

 of relation betAveen some of the elements of our experi- 

 ence, and forced to deny that differential discrimination 



* Stumpf (Tonpsycbologie, i. 116 ff. ) tries to prove that the theory lliat 

 all differences are differences of composition leads necessarily to an infinite 

 regression when we tr}' to determine the unit. It seems to me that in his 

 particidar reasoning he forgets the ultimate units of the mind-stuff 

 theory. I cannot find the completed infinite to be one of the obstacles to 

 belief in this theory, although 1 fully accept Stumpf's genei'al reasoning, 

 and am only too happy to find myself ou the same side with such an ex- 

 ceptionally clear thinker. The strictures by Wahle in the Vierteljsch. f. 

 wiss. Phil, seem to me to have no force, since the writer does not dis- 

 criminate between resemblance of things obviously compound and that of 

 things sensibly simple. 



f The belief thai the causes of effects felt by us to differ qualitatively are 

 facts which differ only in quantity (e.g. that blue is caused by so many 

 ether- waves, and yellow by a smaller number) must not be confounded 

 with the feeling that the effects differ quantitatively themselves. 



