Where unity is real, then, there must be infinite difference, and infinite difference is just what the contradictions of experience impose upon experience and make it responsible to. Infinite difference gives to everything an opposite and to all things unity; to every man a rival and to human society, as a whole, solidarity. Against the material it sets the spiritual; against [p.141] the particular, the general; against the subjective, the objective; against the living, the dead; against the lawful, the lawless; against the caused, the uncaused; and to all these, the spiritual and the material, the subjective and the objective, the living and the dead, the lawful and the lawless, the caused and the uncaused, it gives place in a perfect unity; not, of course, in any material unity, since such unity could not be perfect, but nevertheless in a real unity.
For our first step, therefore, in the ascent of that "impossible subtlety," contradiction is only difference at its greatest limit; for the second, difference in general, whether partial or extreme, marks an underlying, or more precisely an indwelling unity; and for the last step, real unity is served, not betrayed by difference. Moreover, the wider the difference, the nearer it be to positive contradiction or opposition, the more conclusive and effective is the service. Remember, real unity can never take sides; in the world of things it must be always both-sided. It cannot be here or there, now and then--be the then in the past or in the future, this or that. In the words, used of truth, perhaps an appropriate refrain for this book, it can have neither visible form nor body, neither habitation nor name; like the Son of Man, it cannot have where to lay its head. The particular opposition of life and death affords a peculiarly serviceable illustration, for it is, of course, at the bottom of many of the most searching paradoxes of our human experience. Real life cannot be confined to any single organic form or to any single group of organic forms. In fact, it cannot be bound even to the organic as commonly distinguished from the [p.142] inorganic world. So for the biologist, very much as for the theologian, whenever life takes a residence, death must ensue sooner or later. Life and death, then, as opposites, become the medium of real life. But not only have we here a helpful illustration, also we have a suggestion that should prevent an easy misunderstanding. In general, as so plainly in this special case, the opposition, so necessary to reality in experience, to a real life or to any real unity, can itself be complete and effective, not through any single instance of extreme difference, not through the opposition of just two distinct things, but only through an accumulation or summation of all possible instances, so to speak, from difference at zero to difference at infinity. In fact, a real opposition or rather a truly infinite difference, could be only in such a sum. Not the single climax of death, but the constant dying, to which it is only a climax, is what makes real the opposition of life and death and makes this the medium, as was said, of the real life. Death must constantly condition all the movements and processes of life: it must have all possible degrees. And, in like manner, extreme difference at large, just to be real itself and to make for real unity, must be in and through all possible degrees of difference. In other words, the perfect opposition, or contradiction, upon which reality depends, like the perfect death, is rather a continuum than the wide gap, or chasm, which so many have thought it; it is a graduate difference, not a single cataclysmic difference. Difference in gradation or degree, I have sometimes heard it said, is not real difference; but this statement, though by no means without warrant or meaning, is [p.143] misleading. Surely a cataclysmic difference, a "difference in kind," can be only one finite case of difference; the negative, or opposition, in it can be only relative; whereas, when in degree, difference becomes necessarily infinite. Accordingly, as we must not forget, from this point on through the remainder of this book, the contradiction of which we have been thinking and which we have found infecting experience at every turn, is not, what at first and even second thought it may have seemed, just an opposition of two things; between its lines, as it were, it is inclusive of, or maintained by, all the manifold and various things in life and consciousness; it is the completed, short-circuited sum of an infinite series.