Mr. Bradley undertakes in Chapter III of his first book. Here his thesis is (p. 25), that “The arrangement of given facts into relations and qualities may be necessary in practice, but it is theoretically unintelligible.”
The true reason why the concept of the thing involved the foregoing paradoxes is now to become more obvious. It is set forth in three successive theses. First (p. 26): “Qualities are nothing without relations.” For qualities are different from one another. “Their plurality depends on relation, and without that relation they are not distinct” (p. 28). Even were qualities conceived as in themselves wholly separated from one another, and only for us related, still (p. 29) “Any separateness implies separation, and so relation, and is therefore, when made absolute, a self-discrepancy.” “If there is any difference, then that implies a relation.” Mr. Bradley enforces this assertion by a reference, made with characteristic skill, to the paradoxes of the Herbartian metaphysic of the einfache Qualitäten and the zufallige Ansichten (p. 30).
But if it is impossible to conceive qualities without relations, it is equally unintelligible to take qualities together with relations. For the qualities cannot be resolved into the relations. And, if taken with the relations, they “must be, and must also be related” (p. 31). But now afresh arises the problem as to how, in this instance, the variety involved in the also is reducible to the unity which each quality must by itself possess. For a quality, A, is made what it is both by its relations (since, as we have seen, these are essential to its being as a quality), and by something else, namely, by its own inner character. A has thus two aspects, both of which can be predicated of it. Yet “without the use of a relation it is impossible to predicate this variety of A,” just as it was impossible, except by the use of a relation, to predicate the various qualities of one thing. We have therefore to say that, within A, both its own inner character, as a quality, and its relatedness to other facts, are themselves, as varieties, facts; but such facts as constitute the being of A, so that they are united by a new relation, namely, by the very relation which
