at "the same thing may present different essences in different
contexts." Every reality is more than one thing--man is an aggregate of
atoms, a living being, an animal, and a thinker, and all of these are
different things in essence, although having certain common
characteristics. All attribution of "thingship" is abstraction, and all
particular things may be said to participate in higher, i.e., more
abstract, levels of thingship. Hence the effort to retain a thingship
through a changing of essence seems to me but the echo of the motive
that has so long deduced ontological monism from the logical fact that
to conceive any two things is at least to throw them into a common
universe of discourse. Consequently I should part company from Professor
Cohen on this one point (which is perhaps largely a matter of
definition, though here not unimportant) and distinguish merely the
nature of a thing as _actual_ and as _potential_. Of these the former
alone changes with the environment, while the latter changes only as the
thing ceases to be by passing into some other thing. In other words, if
the example does not do violence to Professor Cohen's thought, I can
quite understand this paper as a stimulator of criticism, or as a means
of kindling a fire. Professor Cohen would, I suspect, take this to mean
that the same thing--this paper--must be looked upon as having two
different essences in two different contexts, for "the same thing may
possess two different essences in different contexts," whereas I should
prefer to interpret the situation as meaning that there are before me
three (and as many more as may be) different things having three
different essences: first, the paper as a physical object having a
considerable number of definite properties; second, written words,
which are undoubtedly in one sense mere structural modifications of the
physical object paper (i.e., coloring on it by ink, etc.), but whose
reality for my purpose lies in the power of evoking ideas acquired by
things as symbols (things, indeed, but things whose essence lies in the
effects they produce upon a reader rather than in their physical
character); and third, the chemical and combustion producing properties
of the paper. Now it is simpler for me to consider the situation as one
in which three things have a common point in thingship, i.e., an
abstract element in common, than to think of "_a_ thing" shifting
contexts and thereby changing its essence.

But no