As the same writer puts it: "There is such a thing as
numerical difference, different from conceptual difference,"[14] or
expressing the same thing in other words "there are relations not
grounded in the nature of the related terms."
In this double-barrelled criticism it is important to distinguish what
is really relevant. Whatever the shortcomings of individual writers may
be, modern idealism differs, as we have seen, from the arrested idealism
of Berkeley precisely in the point on which dualism insists. In all
knowledge we are in touch not merely with the self and its passing
states, but with a real object which is different from them. On this
head there is no difference, and idealism need have no difficulty in
accepting all that its opponents here contend. The difference between
the two theories does not consist in any difference of emphasis on the
objective side of knowledge, but in the standard by which the nature of
the object is to be tested--the difference is logical not
metaphysical--it concerns the definition of truth or falsity in the
knowledge of the reality which both admit. To idealism there can be no
ultimate test, but the possibility of giving any fact which claims to be
true its place in a coherent system of mutually related truths. To this
dualism opposes the doctrine that truth and falsehood are a matter of
mere immediate intuition: "There is no problem at all in truth and
falsehood, some propositions are true and some false just as some roses
are red and some white."[15] The issue between the two theories under
this head may here be left with the remark that it is a curious comment
on the logic of dualism that setting out to vindicate the reality of an
objective standard of truth it should end in the most subjective of all
the way a thing appears to the individual. The criticism that applies to
the first of the above contentions applies _mutatis mutandis_ to the
second. As idealism differs from Berkeleyanism in asserting the reality
of an "external" world so it differs from Spinozism in asserting the
reality of difference within it. Determination is not merely negation.
On this head there need be no quarrel between it and dualism. Ours is a
many-sided, a many-coloured world. The point of conflict again lies in
the nature and ground of the assigned differences. Dualism meets the
assertion of absolute unity by the counter assertion of mere difference.
But if it is an error to treat the unity of the world as its only real
aspect, it is equally an error to treat its differences as something
ultimately irreducible. No philosophy founded on this assumption is
likely to maintain itself against the twofold evidence of modern
psychology and modern logic. According to the first the world, whether
looked at from the side of our perception or from the side of the object
perceived, can be made intelligible only when we accept it for what it
is as a real continuity. Differences, of course, there are; and, if we
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