If we divorce or abstract them from their original application, and consider them merely as laws of thinking or of being, any abstract expression, or illustration, or designation of them may easily be pushed into antagonism with other plain truths or first principles equally rudimentary. Without entering into the perplexing and voluminous discussion to which these laws have been subjected by logicians within the last hundred years, a little casuistry is necessary to enable the student to understand within what limits they hold good. _Socrates is Socrates._ The name Socrates is a name for something to which you and I refer when we use the name. Unless we have the same reference, we cannot hold any argument about the thing, or make any communication one to another about it. But if we take _Socrates is Socrates_ to mean that, "An object of thought or thing is identical with itself," "An object of thought or thing cannot be other than itself," and call this a law of thought, we are met at once by a difficulty. Thought, properly speaking, does not begin till we pass beyond the identity of an object with itself. Thought begins only when we recognise the likeness between one object and others. To keep within the self-identity of the object is to suspend thought. "Socrates was a native of Attica," "Socrates was a wise man," "Socrates was put to death as a troubler of the commonweal"--whenever we begin to think or say anything about Socrates, to ascribe any attributes to him, we pass out of his self-identity into his relations of likeness with other men, into what he has in common with other men. Hegelians express this plain truth with paradoxical point when they say: "Of any definite existence or thought, therefore, it may be said with quite as much truth that it _is not_, as that it _is_, its own bare self".[5] Or, "A thing must other itself in order to be itself". Controversialists treat this as a subversion of the laws of Identity and Contradiction. But it is only Hegel's fun--his paradoxical way of putting the plain truth that any object has more in common with other objects than it has peculiar to itself. Till we enter into those aspects of agreement with other objects, we cannot truly be said to think at all. If we say merely that a thing is itself, we may as well say nothing about it. To lay down this is not to subvert the Law of Identity, but to keep it from being pushed to the extreme of appearing to deny the Law of Likeness, which is the foundation of all the characters, attributes, or qualities of things in our thoughts.