It is not difficult to see the common source of the difficulties which beset both the attempt to reduce all reality to qualities, and the attempt to identify it with mere relations. In actual experience our world always comes to us as at once many and one, never as merely single nor as merely discrete. If you pay exclusive regard to the aspect of unity and interconnection, you will naturally be tempted to dwell on the relations between your elements to the exclusion of the various elements themselves; if you think solely of the aspect of variety, it is equally natural to treat the elements as real and their relations as fictions. But in either case you arbitrarily concentrate your attention on a single aspect of the experienced fact taken in isolation from the other, and are thus led to results which are bound to collide with the whole facts. A true view, if possible at all, can only be got by impartial adherence to the whole of the facts. § 9. We are thus brought to the second of our alternatives. Can we conceive of Reality as _qualities in relation_ or qualities _and_ their relations? This is really, in a somewhat more developed form, the same problem as that suggested by the definition of a thing as the “law of its states.” We are now to take the qualities as fixed terms with a character of their own which stand in or support further relations, and we have to ask if the view of the world thus formulated is entirely intelligible. And it speedily becomes clear that such a view is confronted by a formidable difficulty. For suppose that A and B are two qualities which stand in any relation C. (For simplicity’s sake we might suppose this relation C to be, _e.g._, that of being discriminated, and we might take as instances of A and B, say, two definitely discriminated shades of the same colour.) Then A and B, standing in the relation C, are not identical with A and B as they would be apart from this relation. (A, for instance, as qualified by contradistinction from B, is not the same thing as _mere_ A not in any way affected by B, a fact which is frequently brought home to us with startling force by the effects of contrast.) At the same time the relation C cannot create its own terms; A, which is qualified in some special way by its standing to B in the relation C, may also exist out of this relation, and the mere fact of our recognising it as A shows that, both in the relation C and outside it, it has a recognisable identical character. (_E.g._, A as discriminated from B is not precisely the same thing as A before discrimination, but the difference of A from B has not been created by the act of discrimination; it must previously have been different in order to be discriminated.)