Note Footnote 5: — INTRODUCTION.

Hegelians express this plain truth with paradoxical point when they say: "Of any definite existence or thought, therefore, it may be said with quite as much truth that it is not, as that it is, its own bare self".5 Or, "A thing must other itself in order to be itself". Controversialists treat this as a subversion of the laws of Identity and Contradiction. But it is only Hegel's fun—his paradoxical way of putting the plain truth that any object has more in common with other objects than it has peculiar to itself. Till we enter into those aspects of agreement with other objects, we cannot truly be said to think at all. If we say merely that a thing is itself, we may as well say nothing about it. To lay down this is not to subvert the Law of Identity, but to keep it from being pushed to the extreme of appearing to deny the Law of Likeness, which is the foundation of all the characters, attributes, or qualities of things in our thoughts.