attacked next in order, is declared to be, upon the basis of the ordinary conception of things and qualities, and of their relationship, insoluble. The reason given in this case is typical of Mr. Bradley’s position throughout the book, and, despite the general familiarity of the argument to readers of the Hegelian and Herbartian discussions of the concept of the thing, deserves special mention at this point.
A thing is somehow to be one, and “it has properties, adjectives which qualify it.[1] We say that the thing is this or that, predicating of it the adjectives that express its qualities.” But it cannot be “all its properties if you take them each severally.” “Its reality lies somehow in its unity.” “But if, on the other hand, we inquire what there can be in the thing besides its several qualities, we are baffled once more. We can discover no real unity existing outside these qualities, or, again, existing within them.” To the hypothesis that the unity of the thing may be sufficiently expressed by asserting that “the qualities are, and are in relation,” Mr. Bradley replies that the meaning of is remains still doubtful when we say, “One quality, A is in relation with another quality, B” (p. 20). For still one does not, by here using is, intend to reduce A to simple identity with its relations to B, and so one is led to say, “The word to use, when we are pressed, should not be is, but only has.” But the has seems metaphorical. “And we seem unable to clear ourselves from the old dilemma, If you predicate what is different, you ascribe to the subject what it is not; and if you predicate what is not different you say nothing at all.” Nor does one better the case (p. 21) if one amends the phraseology here in question by asserting that the relation belongs equally to both A and B, instead of limiting the assertion in form to A alone. If the relation, however, be no mere attribute of A or of B, or of both of them, but a “more or less independent” fact, namely, the fact that “There is a relation C in which A and B stand,” then the problem of the unity of the thing becomes the problem as to
