Law of identity

“ Relative identity is best understood by thinking of it as partial identity, just as we may think of absolute identity as total identity. In relative identity the whole of one notion may be affirmed of a part of another notion; or a part of one notion may be affirmed of a part of another notion. To illustrate: (1) All men are mortal; (2) Some men are wise. These and their like are made possible because of the law of relative identity. In the first proposition all of the “men” class is identical with a part of the “mortal” class. ”

“ The identity of which diversities are predicated is in no case simple. There is no point which is not itself internally the transition to its complement, and there is no unity which fails in internal diversity and ground of distinction. In short “the identity of opposites,” far from conflicting with the Law of Contradiction, may claim to be the one view which satisfies its demands, the only theory which everywhere refuses to accept a standing contradiction. ”

“ But the highest law of man and of all reasonable beings, the law of perfect internal harmony, of absolute identity, in so far as this law becomes positive and material by means of special individual applications, demands that all the faculties of the individual shall be uniformly developed, all his capacities cultivated to the highest possible perfection ”

“ The Christian view makes uniquely clear the universalism of the moral law. In natural theories the reach and identity of the law has failed rightly to appear. The theory has formed only an ethics for a race, a nation, a condition or caste. It has been particularistic, limited by race lines, tribal or national boundaries, class distinctions, or ancestral traditions. Codes214 of duty have been shaped to local and exclusive conditions. ”

“ I may here, in passing, and for the sake of illustration merely, express the fundamental principle of morality in the following formula: “So act that thou mayest look upon the dictate of thy will as an eternal law to thyself.”
The ultimate vocation of every finite, rational being is thus absolute unity, constant identity, perfect harmony with himself. ”

“ It is the fact that, in his practical life, man recognizes purpose as a necessity, which causes him to read purpose into nature.
"At the basis of identity lies a concept which throws light upon the teleological principle. This is the concept of the General. The basis of the principle of identity is a concept of species which embraces the general in contrast to the singular and particular; just as the judgment of Identity constitutes an advance to still greater Generality. The concept of the General which reaches expression in species coincides with the concept: Law of Nature. ”

“ This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base: the one, and the two.—1. Unity, or Identity; and, 2, Variety. We unite all things, by perceiving the law which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences, and the profound resemblances. But every mental act,—this very perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak, or to think, without embracing both. ”

“ In their stead we have craftily devised conventions, such as that becoming shall mean being, and that for our purposes relative identity may, under the proper precautions, serve as well as absolute. But we stand unalterably committed to the postulate that identity there shall be, though everywhere we have to make it and by force to fit it on the facts. ”

“ Mergement of Identities—A dead one walks, talks, eats, drinks, and does what it chooses while occupying another's body, while the latter's soul is quiescent, and consciousness and identity wholly lost!—a most momentous problem, of enormous importance to every Physician, Judge, Juror, Minister, husband, wife, in short, to every human being. ”

“ As we have seen, besides, Identity is undoubtedly a negative,—not however an abstract empty Nought, but the negation of Being and its characteristics. Being so, Identity is at the same time self-relation, and, what is more, negative self-relation; in other words, it draws a distinction between it and itself. ”

“ And as the same individual republic may not only change its members, but also its laws and constitutions; in like manner the same person may vary his character and disposition, as well as his impressions and ideas, without losing his identity. Whatever changes he endures, his several parts are still connected by the relation of causation. ”

“ Up to the present point, the spot on which we stand, the doctrine of personal identity holds good; hitherto the proud and exclusive pretensions of self ‘come, but no farther.’ The rest is air, is nothing, is a name, or but the common ground of reason and humanity. If I wish to pass beyond this point and look into my own future lot, or anticipate my future weal or woe before it has had an existence, I can do so by means of the same faculties by which I enter into and identify myself with the welfare, the being, and interests of others, but only by these. ”

“ Here, identity is lost in public spirit. Here, a studious observance of the rights of others is ever manifested. Here, the principles fostered by those noble old pioneers are infused into the minds of their successors. ”

“ All identity is gone, and millions of identities will spring from the destruction, identities that we either ignore or regard as infinitely inferior to ourselves; identities that are, in fact, no less important in the Great Whole than we—we who consider ourselves of such vast interest to the Supreme Power ”

“ The amount of sameness, and the kind of sameness, and what the sameness will bring forth—these points all fall outside of our abstract principle. But if any one bases an objection on this ground, he would seem to be arguing in effect that, because, in fact, diverse identities exist, therefore identity, as a fact, has no actual existence. ”

“ We are aware, by the liveliness of our impression, that we have gone in upon an old track; we have the peculiar consciousness called the consciousness of Identity or Agreement. This is one step, but not the whole. In order that the complete restoration may be effected, the features of community must be in such firm contiguous alliance with the features of difference—the special part of the previous subject that the one shall reinstate the idea of the other. ”

“ We do not deny the principle of identity. Hence we have discarded that old view of the world and all the elder doctrines of an absentee creator, a worthless and totally depraved humanity, a legalistic or substitutionary atonement, a magical and non-understandable Incarnation which flowed from it. But we are not discarding with them that other aspect of the truth, the principle of separateness, nor those value judgments, that perpetual vision of another nature, behind and beneath phenomena, from which the old dualism took its rise. ”

“ Against these assertions I shall put some others, viz. that identity and diversity, sameness and difference, imply one another, and depend for their meaning on one another; that mere diversity is nonsense, just as mere identity is also nonsense; that resemblance or likeness, strictly speaking, falls not in the objects, but in the person contemplating (likening, ver-gleichend) ; that ‘is A really like B?’ does not mean ‘does it seem like?’ It may mean ‘would it seem like to everybody?’ but it generally means ‘is there an “objective identity”? ”

“ And we must remark here in passing that, if we accept (as I think we must) the fact that the essence of a man involves identity with others, the question what the final reality of that identity is, is still left unanswered: we should still have to ask what is the higher whole in which the individual is a function, and in which the relative wholes subsist, and to enquire whether that community is, or can be, a visible community at all. ”

“ To avoid confusion between what may be called individual sameness and mere identity of character, we should of course all agree, is most desirable. But the idea that you will avoid a mistake by making an error, that you will prevent a confusion between different kinds of identity by altogether denying one kind, seems to me to be irrational. The identity that you deny will in practice come back always. It may return in a form genuine but disguised, obscured and distorted by the deceptive title of exact likeness. ”

“ Nor let any one think, that the Questions, I have here proposed, about the Identity of Man, are bare, empty Speculations; which if they were, would be enough to shew, That there was in the Understandings of Men no innate Idea of Identity. ”

“ It is therefore Being as Ideality.—It is important to come to a proper understanding on the true meaning of Identity: and, for that purpose, we must especially guard against taking it as abstract Identity, to the exclusion of all Difference. That is the touchstone for distinguishing all bad philosophy from what alone deserves the name of philosophy. Identity in its truth, as an Ideality of what immediately is, is a high category for our religious modes of mind as well as all other forms of thought and mental activity. ”

“ Because diversity of any kind seems, in these familiar cases, to be inconsistent with absolute identity, we draw hastily the universal conclusion, that it is inconsistent with absolute identity in any case. ”

“ And one should really think it self-evident, that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity; any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes. ”

“ How am I to know that I am not imposed upon by a false claim of identity?—But that is ridiculous, because you will have no other self than that which arises from this very consciousness. Why then, this self may be multiplied in as many different beings as the Deity may think proper to endue with the same consciousness, which if it can be renewed at will in any one instance, may clearly be so in an hundred others. ”

“ I hold that by studying more closely what the process of discrimination logically implies, we shall be led to see something regarding what enables us to view all acknowledged facts as linked in a single Ordered System, in which countless definable Series of real facts are interwoven; and hereby we shall be led to a more definite idea of what is meant by the acknowledgment of Law in the natural, in the social, and in the moral order of the world. Thus our notions of the Unity of the world will become, in one aspect at least, more concrete. ”

“ There is no permanence of identity so absolute, either in the physical world, or in our conception of the word “identity,” that it is not crossed with the notion of perpetual change which, pro tanto, destroys identity. Perfect, absolute identity is like perfect, absolute anything—as near an approach to nothing, or nonsense, as our minds can grasp. It is, then, in the essence of our conception of identity that nothing should maintain a perfect identity; there is an element of disintegration in the only conception of integration that we can form. ”

“ And we shall only obtain such a result, as already observed, in so far as the universality of the powers inherent in our humanity are permitted to transpierce the mere particularity of the individual character and, by virtue of the unity thus set up, create a subjective and at the same time individual life which supplies its own principle of unity and self-identity. ”

“ Only we must never forget the difference between these two statements of the Universal Law--the one is cosmic and generic, common to the whole race, whether they know it or not, a Standard to which we all conform automatically by the mere fact of being human beings; while the other is a personal and individual Standard, automatic conformity to which is impossible because that would imply the loss of those powers of Initiative and Selection which are the very essence of Personality ”

“ There is a principle of conformity in nature or of something in common between a number of individuals of the same class, but there is also a principle of contrast, of discrimination and identity, which is equally essential in the system of the universe and in the structure of our ideas both of art and nature. ”

“ Without, then, attempting to assign any very exact limits to the application of a somewhat loosely used word, I may repeat my former statement that men use the word identity to mark certain kinds of sameness in which there is little or no consciousness of duality, and they are not inclined to use it to mark samenesses in which things are recognized as similar but clearly distinct. ”

“ In one word, to fix the human personality, to give to each human being an identity, an individuality that can be depended upon with certainty, lasting, unchangeable, always recognisable and easily adduced, this appears to be in the largest sense the aim of the new method. ”

“ Absolute identity in things up to a certain point, then absolute non-identity, would on this theory take the place of those ultimate qualitative unlikenesses between them, in which we naturally believe; and the mental function of discrimination, ceasing to be regarded as an ultimate one, would resolve itself into mere logical affirmation and negation, or perception that a feature found in one thing, in another does not exist. ”

“ Finally, the persisting identity of a collection of beings, united by some moral bond so as to form a moral unit, is spoken of as moral identity as long as the bond remains, even though the constituent members may be constantly disappearing to be replaced by others: as in a nation, a religious society, a legal corporation, etc. ”

“ Personal identity, therefore, is full disproof of the theory. For personal identity rests in a single abiding consciousness, in which all separate mental acts are known as its own acts, the materials for memory and comparison. The truth is, that all moral distinctions arise out of the conviction that each individual, in the center of his personality, is a soul, itself determining its rational choices and responsible for the conduct of life. ”