 To understand what Bradley means by this, we need to keep in mind that he is here presupposing a bundle view of particulars and that he is using “is” to indicate the identity of the subject with the bundle of qualities (see Wollheim (1959), Bonino (2012) and Baxter (1996) for an interpretation that reads his “is” as an “is” of identity in this context). His concern is thus with the relationship between the whole, conceived as a bundle of qualities, and the qualities themselves. He is worried that if a given quality, say blackness, is different from the whole, and separate from it (i.e., it is not in the bundle of qualities that constitutes the lump of sugar), then it is wrong to attribute it to the whole. But if the quality, say whiteness, is not distinct from the whole, but just a part of the bundle, then the attribution does not add anything new at all, it trivially states what is already the case.