Note 86 — Chapter IV · THE WORLD OF THINGS—(1) SUBSTANCE, QUALITY, AND RELATION

Mr. Hobhouse (op. cit., p. 541 ff.) thinks that the solution is simply that those qualities belong to one “substance,” which are apprehended together as occupying one space. As a working criterion of what we mean by one bodily thing, this account seems satisfactory, and has probably suggested itself spontaneously to most of us. But it leaves untouched the more fundamental question how the identification of a certain sight-space with a certain touch-space is effected, and what are the motives which lead to it. Mr. Hobhouse is content to take the identification as “given in adult perception,” but it seems to me to emerge from his own good account of the matter that it is the still more primitive apprehension of my own body as a felt unity upon which the synthesis between sight and touch spaces is based. If so, the ultimate source of the “unity of substance” must be sought deeper than Mr. Hobhouse is willing to go for it. And quaere, whether his account, if accepted as ultimate, would not lead to the identification of substance with space? For the difficulties which arise when you say the substance is the space and its filling of qualities, see Appearance and Reality, chap. 2, pp. 19, 20 (1st ed.).