If our minds were in a
literal sense _con_terminous, neither could get
beyond the percept which they had in common,
it would be an ultimate barrier between
them -- unless indeed they flowed over it and
became 'co-conscious' over a still larger part
of their content, which (thought-transference
apart) is not supposed to be the case. In point
of fact the ultimate common barrier can always
be pushed, by both minds, farther than any
actual percept of either, until at last it resolves
itself into the mere notion of imperceptibles
like atoms or either, so that, where we do terminate
in percepts, our knowledge is only speciously
completed, being, in theoretic strictness,
only a virtual knowledge of those remoter
objects which conception carries out.
Is natural realism, permissible in logic, refuted
then by empirical fact? Do our minds
have no object in common after all?
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Yet, they certainly have _Space_ in common.
On pragmatic principles we are obliged to predicate
sameness wherever we can predicate no
assignable point of difference. If two named
things have every quality and function indiscernible,
and are at the same time in the same
place, they must be written down as numerically
one thing under two different names.
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