The words 'immanent operation' seem here to mean that the single real being M, of which _a_ and _b_ are members, is the only thing that changes, and that when it changes, it changes inwardly and all over at once. When part _a_ in it changes, consequently, part _b_ must also change, but without the whole M changing this would not occur. A pretty argument, but a purely verbal one, as I apprehend it. _Call_ your _a_ and _b_ distinct, they can't interact; _call_ them one, they can. For taken abstractly and without qualification the words 'distinct' and 'independent' suggest only disconnection. If this be the only property of your _a_ and _b_ (and it is the only property your words imply), then of course, since you can't deduce their mutual influence from _it_, you can find no ground of its occurring between them. Your bare word 'separate,' contradicting your bare word 'joined,' seems to exclude connexion. Lotze's remedy for the impossibility thus verbally found is to change the first word. If, instead of calling _a_ and _b_ independent, we now call them 'interdependent,' 'united,' or 'one,' he says, _these_ words do not contradict any sort of mutual influence that may be proposed. If _a_ and _b_ are 'one,' and the one changes, _a_ and _b_ of course must co-ordinately change. What under the old name they couldn't do, they now have license to do under the new name. But I ask you whether giving the name of 'one' to the former 'many' makes us really understand the modus operandi of interaction any better. We have now given verbal permission to the many to change all together, if they can; we have removed a verbal impossibility and substituted a verbal possibility, but the new name, with the possibility it suggests, tells us nothing of the actual process by which real things that are one can and do change at all. In point of fact abstract oneness as such _doesn't_ change, neither has it parts--any more than abstract independence as such interacts. But then neither abstract oneness nor abstract independence _exists_; only concrete real things exist, which add to these properties the other properties which they possess, to make up what we call their total nature. To construe any one of their abstract names as _making their total nature impossible_ is a misuse of the function of naming. The real way of rescue from the abstract consequences of one name is not to fly to an opposite name, equally abstract, but rather to correct the first name by qualifying adjectives that restore some concreteness to the case. Don't take your 'independence' _simpliciter_, as Lotze does, take it _secundum quid_. Only when we know what the process of interaction literally and concretely _consists_ in can we tell whether beings independent _in definite respects_, distinct, for example, in origin, separate in place, different in kind, etc., can or cannot interact.