Take any two such independent beings. Then, as I observe, these two beings can have no real quality or feature whatever that is actually common to both of them, or that is, apart from name and from seeming, the same in both of them, beyond the mere fact that each exists.
For suppose that they are first said to possess in common a quality. Suppose, namely, that, to an onlooker, they both seem red, or round, like two cherries, but that as a fact they are independent beings. Call this apparently common quality Q. Then let one of the two beings be destroyed. By hypothesis, no change whatever need occur in the other being. And this means, as we now know, that no character or relation, visible or invisible, which is in any wise essential to the first definition of the being that is supposed to remain, is in the least altered when its fellow vanishes. Q, then, the quality supposed to be the same in both beings, survives unchanged in the being that does riot vanish.
But now, if one man survived a shipwreck in which another was drowned, could you then call the survivor the same as the drowned man? But by hypothesis, the quality Q, together with all relationships essential into its reality, survives unchanged in the being that remains, while what is called the same quality in the other being has passed away.
But our realist, unwilling to concede this last consequence, may hereupon say that what he meant was that the quality Q in the two beings was partly the same, and partly not the same. This way of escape I meet, however, with the simple challenge: Leave aside that which is in part. Come to the ultimate fact. If something is only partly the same in your two independent beings,
