# The Conception of God/Chapter 5

* Introduction
* Part I: The Conception of Reality
** I: The Consciousness of Reality
** II: The Possibilities of Experience
** III: The First Argument for Realism
** IV: The Second Argument for Realism, and Its Idealistic Interpretation
** V: The Third Argument for Realism: Transition to Absolute Idealism
* Part II: The Conception of Will and Its Relation to the Absolute
** I: The Essential and the Non-Essential Elements of the Will
** II: The Relation of the Will to the Absolute
** III: General Review of the Argument
* Part III: The Principle of Individuation
** I: Definition of the Problem
** II: The Thomistic Theory of Individuation
** III: The Scotistic Theory of Individuation
** IV: Critical Comparison of the Thomistic and Scotistic Theories
** V: The Individual as Undefinable by Thought, and as Unpresentable in Experience
** VI: The Individual as the Object of an Exclusive Interest
** VII: The Reality of the Individual
** VIII: Individuality and Will
* Part IV: The Self-Conscious Individual
** I: Empirical Self Consciousness and Its Contents
** II: Genesis of the Empirical Ego
** III: Reality of the Ego
** IV: The Self-Consciousness of the Absolute
** V: The Absolute and the Finite Individual
** VI: The Temporal Relations of the Individual
** VII: The Immortality of the Individual
* Part V: Replies to Criticisms
** I: Professor Howison, and the Antinomy of the Moral World
** II: Professor Mezes, and the Contents of Reality
** III: Professor Le Conte, and the Concept of Evolution
THE ABSOLUTE AND THE INDIVIDUAL
INTRODUCTION
The public discussion at Berkeley, whose documents the Philosophical Union published shortly after the event, in pamphlet form, was, as a fact, immediately succeeded by several more private meetings, in which the leader of the original debate had ample opportunity to reply to his critics, and to expound further consequences of his theses. The proceedings of these meetings remained unprinted. More than a year has since passed. The Philosophical Union now desires to give the whole discussion a more permanent form, and in doing so kindly invites the present writer to put on record his replies to his critics, to extend and confirm, at his pleasure, his main argument, and to expound some further developments of his doctrine.
In accepting, once more, the hospitality of the Union, and in using it in the following pages, I feel it all the more my duty, as the guest thus invited to return to such pleasant company, not to mar a controversy, whose principal interest lies in the instructive contrast of the points of view adopted by the speakers, — not to mar this controversy, I say, through any idle effort to make, as it were, an end ​of my friendly opponents by limiting myself to a hand-to-hand contest with their theses. In particular (to refer here to one of these theses), the antithesis between Monistic Idealism and Ethical Individualism, upon which Professor Howison, in his important paper, has laid such stress, reveals, as a fact, a very deep and instructive antinomy of Reason; an antinomy which, as I believe, we must all recognise before we can hope to solve it or transcend it. In my own former paper, I made no mention of this antinomy, — not because I failed to recognise it, but because I conceived that I had there no space for it. Professor Howison has given it the first place in the discussion. To me it has always been a problem that, despite its vast importance, is secondary to the central problem of philosophy. On the other hand, I have profited greatly by Professor Howison’s brilliant vindication of Ethical Individualism, and I hope to show, before I am done, that I have thus profited. To be sure, I am still unable to alter either the thesis or the essential process of reasoning expounded in my original discussion. Both can be stated in countless ways. But in their essence, I must still hold each to be valid. Accordingly I also have still to maintain that every estimate of the place of the Individual in the universe must be made subject to the validity of some such argument for the Absolute, and subject to the supremacy, the unity, and the all-embracing sole reality of the Absolute as defined by this argument. But on the other hand, an argument concerning the grade of reality possessed by ethical individuals has its place in the ​development of an idealistic philosophy, and its place is in some ways well defined by Professor Howison’s paper. I shall accordingly seek, in what follows, reconciliation rather than refutation. I shall try to show, not that Professor Howison is wrong in the stress which he lays upon the ethical importance of his individuals, but that the Absolute, as I have ventured to define the conception, has room for ethical individuality without detriment to its true unity, or to the argument that I advanced for its reality. I shall also try to show that the very essence of ethical individuality brings it at last, despite the mentioned antinomy, into a deeper harmony with the concept of the Absolute that I venture to maintain; so that, as I shall try to explain, just because the ethical individual is sacred, therefore must his separate life be “hid,” in a deep and final sense, in the unity of the system to which he is freely subordinated. For his ethical life is, as such, a life of free subordination. He cannot be ethical and undertake to exist separately from God’s life. On the other hand, as I shall try to maintain, the unity of this system, i.e. of the Absolute, as defined in my thesis is not a dead unity, — a night that devours all, — but precisely the unity of many, where the many are; but the unity is still supreme, while the unity is supreme just because the many exist, over whom and in whom it is supreme.
Such phrases are obscure enough, apart from the argument that alone can give them meaning. I use them here only by way of indicating that I desire not to refute Professor Howison’s essential views, but to define individuality in a way that may tend to ​bring his views and mine into harmony. In much the same sense I desire to make use of the views of my other two critics. And still further, I wish to use this opportunity to give the whole conception of the Absolute which I am permitted to defend a more careful statement, a more minute examination, a fuller defence, and a more extended development than I have heretofore had the opportunity to do.
I regret only that the situation in which the present opportunity puts me is thus so necessarily that of restating and defending what appears as my own thesis; as if it were in any sense my own property, or a cause in the least dependent upon me for just this present defence. “What can I clearly see?” — this is the ceaseless question of the student of philosophy. In this sense, and in this only, he seeks, as such a student, for self-consciousness. But otherwise, ideally speaking, he ought as a philosopher to have no personal property in ideas, no private cause to defend, no pet thesis to maintain, no argument for whose fate he fears, no selfish concern whether he refutes or is refuted, no author’s fondness for his past productions, no advocate’s pride in maintaining his old notions. Naked of all private treasures, he ought to seek, each time anew, the priceless pearl of truth. This, in fact, is the model that Plato’s dialogues set before the thinker. However often one might win this pearl of truth, one’s frailty, and one’s fleeting moments, would ever again turn the possession of it into a mere memory of former insight; and so one must ever seek afresh. This is the thinker’s ideal. If fortune makes him a poor professor, telling over and over again his ​old tale in lectures; an anxious author, unready to deny his former books; a human disputant, eager not to be worsted in his dialectics, — well, these are the doings of fortune, and of his wretched earthly self. His only worth as philosopher lies, not, in the last analysis, in his consistency, or in his skill in defence, but purely in the transparency, if such they have, that permits the light occasionally to shine through his defects. In such a spirit I desire the following, which is in form a defence of my private thesis, to be estimated. However much I employ anew old material, the only worth of the task must lie in the present unity of the insight developed, whether in the author’s or in the reader’s mind.
This supplementary discussion will consist of five parts. In the first, I shall re-examine the general argument for the reality of the Absolute. In the second, following lines indicated in one of the supplementary and more private discussions of the Union at Berkeley, mentioned above, I shall endeavour to develope the relation of the notion of Will to the concept of the Absolute. In the third, I shall attack, in general terms, the logical and metaphysical problem of the nature of Individuality; or, to use the well-known scholastic phrase, I shall study the “Principle of Individuation,” in its general relations to the concept of Reality. In this division I shall dwell upon considerations which have grown upon me, in part, since the first publication of Professor Howison’s paper. In the fourth part, I shall apply both of the foregoing discussions, namely, that of the Will and that of the Principle of Individuation, to the problem ​of the definition of human, i.e. self-conscious, Individuality in its metaphysical implications, referring especially to the problem of Freedom, and, incidentally, to that of Immortality. Here I shall again make some use of material presented to the Union in 1895. In the fifth part, I shall bring together the views advanced in the foregoing parts, in such fashion as to indicate, before I close, some of my relations to the objections of my critics. ​
PART I THE CONCEPTION OF REALITY
The conception of Reality is one which philosophical writers of all schools and tendencies must face and consider. In the present day, when popular philosophy is largely under the influence of more or less decidedly agnostic traditions, it is customary to make light of attempts to say anything positive about the Absolute; but it is all the more popular to say: “Oh, we modern men, discarding the fantasies of the past, rejecting a priori constructions, trusting solely to experience, — we seek, in our philosophy, for the Real.” “And the Real,” one continues, “is not something that metaphysical dreaming can make out. It is something forced upon us by the irresistible compulsion of experience. We know regarding it, not its ultimate structure, but its appearances in our individual experience. Ultimate truth is a dream of the philosophers.”
In the argument with which this debate opened, I attempted some dealing with just such relatively ​“agnostic” tendencies; and I tried to show that, whether they will it or not, the thinkers referred to cannot consistently deal with the Real, as experience shows it, without, in the end, coming face to face with the Absolute, so that every assertion of the compulsion which forces upon us finite Facts, must in the end imply, with an equal necessity, the unity of all facts in one Absolute Reality, whose nature we can in general determine, despite our ignorance of the details of its life. But in developing this argument, I was necessarily forced, by the lack of space, to ignore many of even the most familiar efforts to state the more ordinary type of Realism in such fashion as to avoid accepting my definition, or in fact any definition, of the Absolute. The questions that have been raised by my critics, however, as to the true scope, meaning, and outcome of my argument, can best be answered through a careful review of the essence of the argument itself. And this careful review, in its turn, can best be accomplished, less by a direct onslaught upon my idealistic friends than by a more minute comparison of my notion with those realistic arguments in conflict with which it was, in the first place, developed. I myself came into this field, originally, not to war with fellow-idealists, but to criticise the Realism of ordinary tradition. A contrast with the metaphysical views of our common opponents will therefore help us, who are engaged in this discussion, to comprehend better the scope and implications of our own theory.
On the other hand, here as everywhere in philosophy, refutation is never our whole business. Even ​the most unreflective and popular Realism embodies a truth, which it is our duty as idealists to comprehend, and to include within a larger truth. Moreover, as I hold, that truth upon which realistic doctrines lay a falsely one-sided stress is intimately related to the very truth which Professor Howison seeks to bring into such prominence; and Professor Howison himself, in declaring that the concept of “things in themselves” must ultimately receive an ethical interpretation, has explicitly pointed out a deep relation between the realistic and the ethical theories of Being. In short, Professor Howison’s thesis might be called an Ethical Realism quite as fairly as an Ethical Idealism. It becomes me, therefore, in the re-examination of the concept of Reality to give some of the fundamental conceptions of Realism the fairest scrutiny that space here permits. For of course no Idealism can in the end be acceptable which is not just both to those “external facts” upon which the realist usually lays such stress, and to those moral realities to which Professor Howison devotes his attention. And the thesis that the true basis of the so-called “external facts,” the real meaning of the “things in themselves,” lies in the moral world, is one that for me, as for Professor Howison, has great philosophical importance.
I shall therefore, in the present part of my paper, first scrutinise some realistic interpretations of the meaning of the concept of Reality; then, as I proceed, I shall restate and defend my idealistic interpretation of this concept; and thus I shall prepare the way for an effort, in the later parts of this paper, ​so to develope Idealism that it may include the truth both of ordinary Realism and of the ethical interpretation of reality.
I THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF REALITY
One sees, hears, touches, — in general, one experiences, — “the real world.” One thinks of the “real,” is subject to the laws of the real, is in fact constantly in a compulsory bondage to this reality. This is the “fact,” the “simple fact,” upon which, again and again, popular forms of Realism base themselves. If you ask: But what means this word “reality,” as applied to characterise what one sees, hears, touches, thinks about, and finds oneself compelled to submit to? the answer comes: “Reality connotes independence of the experience and thought and will of the being who deals as we do with the real.” Thus, that I know, feel, and am bound by, the presence of reality, is a fact in me, a modification of my experience, of my thought, and of my will. But that the real is, this is something independent of me, and this fact is there whether I know it or not, whether I think so or not, whether I want it or not. What thus compels me, is beyond me and independent of me. What is my object, needs, as such, not at all the plastic and submissive presence of me as subject. As subject, I am, to be ​sure, in relation to an object; the real that I experience or think, then and there stands in relation to me. But this relation is non-essential to the reality of either the subject or the object. The object is real, in so far as it needs me not, but is independent; just as I too am real, in so far as I should still be I, even if I knew not just this object that I at any one moment know. Knowing subject and known reality, the object, are related, to use Sigwart’s expression just cited in the foot-note, somewhat as are horse and rider. The rider is, in his own being, independent of the horse; although, while he rides, he exists in this relation to the horse, which, on its part, is then subject to the rider’s compulsion.
What I know, then, when I touch, see, think, is that there is somewhat that is independent of me, and that compels me to know, at each moment, thus or thus, or to modify my will in this way or in that. This is the general presupposition of Realism. And in considering it, a realist usually first points out that this is the universal presupposition of the natural human consciousness. Whoever questions this presupposition, thus has, as they say, the “burden of proof” upon his hands. “Consciousness” seems to “bear witness” to the presupposition that one thus constantly knows an independently real object-world to be present. The questioner, the sceptic, — yes, as the realists insist, the idealist, — must first show how he dares, as a being who knows only through ​the light of consciousness, to doubt the “testimony of consciousness.” Is not every such doubt doomed from the start to contradiction? What can guide the doubt concerning the “testimony of consciousness” except consciousness itself? Who can cross-question or refute this “witness” without appealing to the very witness in person?
But whether one calls it doubting or not, it seems certain that we have a right, as students devoted to reflection upon first principles, to ask, a little more precisely, what the “testimony” in question means, to what sort of independence it bears witness, and in what sense the testimony is supposed to be presented in or through consciousness. To ask such questions is to begin the course of reflection which leads to Idealism. In my original paper I treated these questions in a fashion necessarily very summary. Let us here examine some of them a little more closely, for the sake of later comprehending more clearly the implications of our own position. For, I repeat, the presuppositions of ordinary Realism have a close relation to those which Professor Howison opposes to my thesis.
There is, in everybody’s consciousness, the evidence of somewhat whose existence is independent of this consciousness itself. Here is the thesis. If we examine consciousness to find of what nature this evidence is, we meet with a well-known difference of opinion. Some thinkers teach, as Reid no doubt in the main meant to teach, that this evidence for the independent reality is simply “immediate.” That is, this evidence, in its direct character as mere feeling, ​is superior to all reflection. One does not first reason towards any realistic result. One just feels the world to be independent, as one feels red to be red. Others teach that this evidence, although certain and unquestionable, is “mediate,” or in other words is an evidence that comes by means of a certain process of interpreting facts in accordance with principles, or of reasoning from data. The teachers of this latter thesis, again, vary in their expressions. Some declare that the certainty of the independent reality of the object-world is mediated by a general and a priori “intuition” of some sort, a principle more or less obviously innate, whose deliverance is the unquestionable assertion that there must be some external basis, some independent truth, behind the mere fact of consciousness. Others appeal to a character found each time afresh, in the individual data of perception, but experienced as having a mediate or indirect significance. This character is a certain tendency of the experienced facts to refer beyond themselves, not by virtue of any general intuition on the part of the knowing subject, but by virtue of a stamp or mark of “reference” which some of the data themselves empirically possess, just as one’s desires are often said to be experienced as referring to their own, perhaps distant, fulfilment. One experiences the presence of this “reference” in each new fact of external experience. Others, still, declare that we first experience, within ourselves, the genuine though limited efficacy of our own active wills in directing some of our own states, and that, hereupon, perceiving that this efficacy is limited, that this inner ​activity is held in check, by the presence of our external experiences, which come and go whether or no we wish them to do so, we secondarily, and by a process of mediate reasoning, conclude from this our own relative impotence the existence of causes which limit us, and which are therefore independent of us, although their power is expressed in those of our experiences which are beyond our own control.
These and other realistic interpretations of the facts of experience have in common the recognition of one very important character of our present consciousness, namely, its essentially fragmentary, its immediately unstable character, in so far as it is regarded with reference to its meaning. That our consciousness, as it comes, means more than it presents, and somehow implies a beyond for which it insistently seeks, — this indeed is a central characteristic of our experience, and one upon which all insight and all philosophy depend. The anxiety of ordinary thought to interpret this reference in terms of an “independently real” world, which shall “transcend” all consciousness whatever, is due to manifold motives, and in part to relatively unphilosophical motives, whose origin I take to be largely social. But no idealist can doubt the presence in consciousness of those primary tendencies upon which realists of all types have laid such stress. The question is as to the interpretation of such motives. In what sense is it that our consciousness is always pointing beyond itself? ​
II THE POSSIBILITIES OF EXPERIENCE
The easiest way to begin a comprehensible answer to this question is, as I must forthwith insist, the way that I indicated in my first paper — the way upon which idealists have so often insisted. When any experience refers beyond itself, what it at the very least may refer to, what it may aim to grasp and to know, what it may regard as valid independently of its own contents, may well be, and in our lives often explicitly is, other possible experience not here presented. One has an experience of a blue object that seems to be “yonder on the horizon.” One’s experience herewith undertakes to refer to a reality that exists independently of just this experience. But the reality in question may be explicitly regarded, not as any Ding an sich, but solely as other, “really possible,” experience. “If I approach,” one may mean, “if I move towards yonder mountain, I shall cease to experience a mere patch of blue on the horizon. I shall erelong see bold outlines, the forms of crags, of valleys, of forests. In the end, if I approach near enough, I shall experience what I shall call the touch of the solid objects yonder.” Now in saying this I at least may abstract from all reference to the “transcendent” objects of the realist. I may be meaning simply, that, whereas I now experience such or such visual contents, it is permanently possible that I should experience other contents, visual and tactile, if I performed certain acts. These permanent possibilities ​of experience I may conceive as independent of my present visual experience, as valid even if I died, still more if I closed my eyes or slept. To this independent validity of the possibilities of experience I may be referring, when I talk of something which is independent of my present experience. In talking of the way in which consciousness can refer “beyond itself,” we must not ignore, then, the cases where this reference beyond self is to possible contents of consciousness not here realised, but regarded as permanently realisable. This sort of reference is, as before shown, by no means free from obscurity; but it seems to be a reference often made, and we must take it into account when a realist lays stress upon the tendency of consciousness to look for something independent of its own contents. This independent something may be the independent validity of a “permanent possibility of experience,” in the sense of Kant’s “mögliche Erfahrung,” and of Mill’s famous chapter.
But this reference to the permanent possibilities of experience does not exhaust the sorts of reference to independent reality which we often find in consciousness. At any moment I may think of the past or of future experiences. When I think of them, I refer to what transcends the moment. Yet I do not refer to what transcends all experience, but I refer to what, in its supposed truth, is indeed conceived as independent of the contents of this my momentary memory or expectation. Hope as I will, regret as I will, my past deeds, my future destiny (say, my future experience of growing old), have aspects which are viewed ​as quite independent of my present hopes and of my present regrets. The latter are experiences that imply a reference to what both transcends them and is true independently of them. But this transcendent and independent reality of past or of future is still not the realist’s Ding an sich, but is a content of experience. Finally, when I converse with another man, and suppose myself to be comprehending what he says, my experiences refer beyond themselves to a reality supposed by me to have an aspect quite independent of my experience, but this independence is still only the independence belonging to an experience other than mine, namely, my fellow’s experience.
When an experience refers beyond itself, it may, then, be referring to “other experience, actual and possible, not here presented.” Mysterious as all such reference appears when first critically examined, there can be no doubt of the presence and of the frequency of just such forms of appeal to the “transcendent.” There can also be no doubt, that every such appeal from one moment of consciousness to other experience, actual and possible, presents itself as a reference to a reality. The past and the future, my neighbour’s mind, and the whole range of the “genuine possibilities” of experience, — these are, for any moment of experience that refers to any of them, as really “independent” realities, which one knows or does not know, truly ​grasps or falsely reports, finds mysterious or regards as clear and certain, — as really independent realities as if they were “things in themselves.” Only, in the case of these types of objects, however hard the individual object may be to know with assurance, the type of object itself seems in one respect knowable enough. For it is no “thing in itself.” It is explicitly an object in so far as it either is or may be the content or the existence of some experience. The problem therefore arises: “Can other types of objects than these be defined or accepted?” The ordinary realist says. Yes. For the idealist, all depends upon confining his real objects to the objects of the foregoing types, in so far as, after criticism, these types can all be reduced to his own sort of rational unity, and the relative independence of their objects can be explained accordingly.
But let the realist now continue his parable. Other sorts of “independent” objects there are and must be, he declares. Why? First, to follow one type of Realism, because we “immediately know” that there are such transcendent objects independent of all consciousness. But, so one replies, how can consciousness immediately know what is by hypothesis immediately determined as not present to consciousness, namely, precisely the independent aspect of the object, or the fact that if the consciousness were not, the object would still be as it is? “I see immediately in front of me that there is something behind my back.” “I feel immediately that if I did not feel, there would still be something there to feel.” No; immediate knowledge is of what is felt, not of what is not felt. ​The existence of the object, when it is not felt, is ipso facto something not felt. This existence, as for argument’s sake we may momentarily admit, may indeed be “known,” that is, it may be believed in, from the start, it may be accepted as a “postulate,” it may be concluded from signs, from intuitions, from reasonings long or brief; but, in any case, it cannot be a matter of merely immediate knowledge. For immediate knowledge, if it means anything, means knowledge of what is present in feeling.
One turns, then, to the other forms of Realism. Consciousness somehow, although not in a merely immediate way, bears witness to the presence of a transcendent object, which is independent of all consciousness. But, once more. How?
Amongst the numerous answers to this question attempted by philosophical realists, there are three which here especially concern us. They form the genuine basis of the more reflective sorts of Realism; and together they actually express a truth.
III THE FIRST ARGUMENT FOR REALISM
The first of these three answers runs: The data of our experience, and in fact of all consciousness, viewed just as the data of consciousness, present themselves in such form as to call for explanation. The explanation called for cannot be furnished by other data of consciousness; for these, again, being such data, would themselves require explanation. ​Therefore, that which explains the data of consciousness must lie beyond all consciousness, and so must be a transcendent object.
But this answer is itself capable of taking various forms. Its most common form lays stress upon the conception of Causality, and calls for a causal explanation of the conscious data. Our consciousness, so one asserts, does not cause its own data, except in the case of our acts of spontaneity (if there be such acts). In general, the data of sense come to us with a certain Zwang, a compulsion, over which our will is powerless. This compulsion, which binds our experience, is, then, not explained by anything within the limits of this experience itself. But explanation is needed. Something must cause the data to be what they are. Shall this something be another state of consciousness? Or shall it be a fact of a real and transcendent world, independent of all consciousness? The first of these two answers, one says, would only postpone the problem. Consciousness nowhere shows us enough self-explained facts to form a basis for the causal explanation of the other facts. Consciousness is full of data that come in a compulsory fashion; but consciousness nowhere presents to us as a part of its own content anything adequate to furnish us the source of the compulsion. Consciousness, as such, is dependent. The transcendent objects alone can be causally independent — the sources from which our data proceed.
Other hardly less favourite ways of stating this insistence upon explanation demand either logical or teleological explanations of the conscious data, in such ​fashion as to lead to the assumption of the transcendent objects. Conscious data are “appearances.” Appearances imply “Etwas das da erscheint.” Where there is so much smoke, there must be fire. Experience is the smoke. Only what transcends consciousness could be the fire, i.e., here, the logically intelligible basis of the appearances. Again, were there nothing transcendent, experience would be a dream, without even a dreamer. These various ways of attempting to show that the denial of the transcendent would involve a denial of a “necessary logical implication of the very existence of a world of appearance,” thus gradually pass, through the metaphor of the “dream,” to a stage where the “explanation” called for, the “implication” insisted upon, is rather teleological than either causal or logical. To deny the transcendently real world would be to make experience “meaningless,” by depriving it of “good sense,” by leaving no true difference between dream and waking, between science and madness. “Ein gesunder Realismus,” as some recent German writers love to call it, could alone so explain experiences as to give significance to our conscious data, which “amount to nothing” unless there are transcendent realities behind them. Hence, only the dreamy men of the closet can be idealists. Practical men, and men wide awake, believe in transcendent realities. In fact, it is more or less immoral not to believe in such transcendent realities. Thus in the end our realist may approach as nearly as you please to the arguments, and, as we shall see, to the theses, of Professor Howison. ​
Into the manifold motives expressed in these various efforts to explain the data of consciousness by the existence of transcendent objects, we cannot here further look. Our business is not with what makes such arguments so plausible as they are, but with the general question of their validity. It is enough here to observe, in passing, that the true motives, and the popular plausibility, of all such arguments can be understood only when you consider the essentially social basis upon which, in the last analysis, the usual realistic explanations of the data of consciousness rest. These explanations are, namely, appeals, in one form or another, to conceptions more or less essential to the stability and to the definiteness of human social intercourse. They are, accordingly, efforts to interpret ultimate realities in forms suggested by the special canons and categories of human social intercommunication. This essentially conventional basis of the popular Realism of those who “explain” the data of consciousness by transcendent objects, renders the arguments of such Realism as psychologically interesting, in their history and in their various formulations, as they are inadequate to the task of formulating any ultimate philosophical theory of reality. But we have here to do with their validity, and not with their natural history.
Their validity, however, can be easily tested, and in a way that applies equally to all their various forms. One has data, ɑ, b, c, etc. One says: “There is known to us some principle of explanation which declares that wherever any fact, p, of the type to which ɑ, b, c, etc., belong, is presented, there must ​exist a fact behind or beyond p, namely x, such that x explains p by standing to p in the known relation R, — say, the relation of cause to effect, or of logical condition to consequent, or of teleological explainer to that whose sense or meaning it explains. And, in general, the relation R is such as to require x to be of another type than p. Now, in case a, b, c, etc., are data of experience, then the x which stands to any one of them in the relation R does not, by hypothesis, belong, in general, to the series a, b, c, etc. Hence, in general, it must be transcendent.”
I reply, in the usual idealistic fashion: What do you mean by this relation R? I care not how you know that such a relation is necessary, or must exist. This your knowledge may be a human convention or a primal “intuition.” That here concerns us not. What I ask is, how you express to your mind the nature of this relation R, whatever it is, and wherever it may exist or be known to exist. Do you or do you not mean, by this relation R, a relation which you at once conceive as capable of being presented to you in some possible experience? You say: “The relation is real.” You mean something by the assertion, and something said to be well known to you. For the relation R is by hypothesis especially clear to you. You are so sure of it that you use it to prove the presence of that otherwise unknowable and transcendent x and you define x as that which stands in the relation R to any fact p of our experience. Is not, then, this relation R clear to you just because, however it is supposed to be realised, a possible experience could present to you the known situation ​that the relation expresses? For instance, let the relation R be the causal relation. You know, by hypothesis, what causation means. Surely this implies that in your experience you have already met, or could meet, with cases of what you would recognise as causal relation; and that wherever a causal relation exists, it is like in its nature to what you experience, or get presented to your intelligence, when you know particular instances of causation. The causal relation, if thus clear to you, is ipso facto clear to you as something that could be instanced, presented, and comprehended in a possible experience. So too with any other relation whose nature is now clear to you. Now, if this be true, how can p, which is a fact of experience, be viewed as standing in a certain relation R (which also is, by hypothesis, a fact of a possible experience) to something, x, whose very nature is that it is no fact of any possible experience, being a reality that is utterly transcendent? This is as if you should say: “I know quantities, ɑ, b, c, etc.; and I know a relation R, viz., that of equality. Hereupon, however, I declare that a, or b, or c, stands in this known relation R, viz., in the relation of equality, to a certain x which is expressly defined as something which is no quantity at all.” This would be absurd. It is precisely as absurd to say: Contents of experience stand in a known and clear relation, that itself is, as such, an object of possible experience, to something that is to be expressly defined as no object of any possible experience whatever. If the relation is, as such, an object of a possible experience, then its terms are so too. ​
But a realist may try to escape this consequence. He may say: “No, the relation R is itself, to my mind, something sure, indeed, but transcendent. I do not regard causality in itself, or explanation in itself, as capable of being presented to the mind in any possible experience. What I say is, that the facts of the type exemplified by p are known to stand in a transcendent relation R to a transcendent basis x. This is sure. But R is as transcendent as x.”
I reply: Thus you but open the door to a fatal infinite progress. One asks you, again: What evidence can you give for this transcendent and unexperienced existence, beyond consciousness, of R, — say, of causation, or of some other form of explanatory relation? Afresh you must answer, if you still cling to the present line of argument: “Because the facts of experience demand, for their explanation, the existence of some such transcendent relation to transcendent realities.” But this new demand for explanation introduces a new relation, R' between the facts of experience, a, b, c, etc., and the first relation R, which was to be that relation to x whereby they were explained. All our questions as to R now recur as to R' the new mediator that is to bring us to the assumption of R. For instance, if you first had said: “The data of experience need causation to explain them,” one has now asked you, as above: What sort of causation? — the sort of causation known within experience, and, by its very definition, known as a datum of possible experience? Our realist is now supposed to have replied: “Not so. The causation whereby I explain the data of experience is itself a ​transcendent sort of causation, that, as a relation existent outside of experience, links us to the transcendent objects which cause experience in us.” Hereupon, however, one asks, at the present stage: What, then, leads you to believe in the existence of that transcendent sort of causation? The realist hereupon may reply: “Why, some of the data of consciousness are such as demand, as their sufficient cause, the existence of just such transcendent causality. For our idea of this transcendent causality is an idea that in itself needs a cause. And of this idea the transcendent causality is the only sufficient cause.” I answer, at once: The infinite regress is under way. You are no whit forwarder. You have not begun to show how the transcendent explains anything. For you explain the data by a transcendent x only because the relation of causality is said to be sure and to imply x. Asked, however, to explain your assurance of this transcendent causality, you say that there surely must be some transcendent cause for our experienced assurance of causality. And thus you may continue as long as you please.
IV THE SECOND ARGUMENT FOR REALISM, AND ITS IDEALISTIC INTERPRETATION
The first argument of our realist, when closely viewed, thus involves either an infinite regress, or else an appeal to conceptions which our former account of reality as being “the content of actual and of pos​sible experience” has already included and defined. If, by saying that an experience, p, needs an explanation in the existence of some fact x, which stands to p in the relation R, one refers to a relation R identical with an already known and experienced relation, one inevitably implies the assertion: “If the fact p were properly known, it would be experienced as in the relation R to x”; and hereupon x, as well as p, must be viewed as the object or content of a possible experience. Thus x ceases to be anything that we have so far regarded as a transcendent object. But if one regards the relation R itself as a transcendent relation, a new mediating relation, R', is needed to make valid any argument for the transcendent reality of the first relation R; and an infinite regress becomes necessary.
The first argument of the realist accordingly fails. But he has ready a second and more cogent consideration. Instead of permitting this x to become essentially a fact of experience as before, by virtue of the conception of the real as the “content of possible experience,” he now directly undertakes to use this latter conception as an argument for his own, and to absorb whatever is implied by a “content of possible experience” in his own notion.
This second and more cogent realistic argument runs as follows: It has been admitted by the supposed opponent of Realism that he himself is unable to state in terms of experience that is altogether concrete and actual, or that, in other words, is the experience of somebody in particular, the whole constitution of the truth to which he appeals. He is ​forced, as has been seen in the foregoing, to appeal to “possible experience.” He asserts that beyond the confines of what anybody does experience there are an indefinite number of “possibilities of experience.” Now these possibilities of experience are either genuine facts when and while they are not experienced, or else they are mere illusions, just in so far as they are called mere possibilities, and are not the contents of anybody’s actual experience. To admit the latter of these alternatives would be to deprive the opponent of Realism of all that makes his doctrine popularly plausible, or even rational. For it is admitted by the opponent of Realism, that our concrete experience implies much which does not now get presented to it. And the supposed “possibilities of experience” are intended to supply the place of what is thus implied. If they are illusions, then this place is not supplied. On the other hand, the first of the alternatives mentioned admits that the possibilities of experience have some sort of being when nobody experiences them. And such being, outside of any concrete experience, is precisely what the realistic hypothesis demands. In vain, so the realist now urges, does the opponent endeavour by the phrase “possible experience” to cloak the fact that a possibility of experience, when it is real but unexperienced, as much exists wholly beyond the range of experience as if it were frankly reduced to a “thing in itself,” of the sort that the realist himself defines.
It will be unnecessary here to analyse at any length the cogency of this argument. In my original paper, ​I expressly pointed out that the “possibilities of experience,” in so far as they remained bare possibilities, are as unintelligible as the realist’s “things in themselves.” Idealism cannot pause half-way without falling a helpless prey to the counter-dialectics of the realists. Our Idealism, as we first stated it, both in the original paper and in the earlier portion of the present review, is just such a half-way Idealism. In presence of the realistic counter-arguments, it is helpless to defend its positive assertion. It is only able continually to reassert its own kind of objection to the positive thesis of the realist. But it is indeed fair to say, that the objection of the half-idealist to the positive realistic thesis in question is precisely as cogent as the realistic rejoinder. Each theory, as a fact, is, so far, helpless to defend its positive assertions against an opponent’s criticism. The realist asserts: “Beyond all our experience, there is something wholly unlike experience, the ‘thing in itself.’” To this thesis our half-idealist always rejoins: “What do you mean by your ‘thing in itself,’ — by the reality, and by the nature, that you ascribe to it? And in what relation do you mean it to stand to experience? As soon as you tell, you interpret your supposed reality wholly in terms of experience. You never define that transcendent beyond, of which you speak. You say, only: ‘If we looked further into the nature of what our present experience implies, we should get other experiences in addition to those that we now have.’ Into such possibilities of experience your ‘thing in itself,’ as well as all its relations, causal and other, to our present experience, is transformed, in ​so far as you tell what you mean. Whatever you assert as existent beyond our experience, without telling what you mean by the assertion, that, by hypothesis, you have not really and rationally asserted. For a meaningless assertion is no assertion at all. You want to say that beyond our experience there is something transcendent, whose nature is never experienced, whose contents always remain outside of the world of experience. But you can never tell what you mean by this beyond, precisely in so far as it remains a beyond. Telling what you mean is transforming your beyond into something within the world of experience. Therefore I reject your beyond altogether. Experience is all. Yet I admit that much experience remains to us indeed only a ‘possibility.’” “Yes,” retorts the realist, “but in your last word you have admitted the very essence of my whole contention. For within the range of what individuals do experience you admit that we cannot remain. You admit the possibilities of experience as somehow genuine. You cannot do without them. Yet, as soon as you admit them, you admit an element transcending concrete experience. You admit something whose presence you cannot escape, but whose nature you find it as hard to define as I find it hard to tell precisely what I mean by that transcendent something which my theory frankly admits, and glories in, but which your theory grudgingly recognises, even in trying to conceal the fact of the recognition. Your possibilities are either mere illusions, or else facts. If facts are not experienced, they are beyond experience. And such beyond is all that I ​maintain. I should indeed prefer to say that what you call ‘possibilities’ exist beyond experience as grounds of possibility, unknown natures of things, which determine in advance what our experience shall be when it comes. Such a fashion of statement appears to me a franker admission of the inevitable transcendence.” And our half-idealist can now only retort once more: “But what do you mean by the beyond, whether of the possibility or of its ground, known or unknown? Tell what you mean, and this beyond becomes no longer unknown, no longer transcendent. It becomes content of experience.” And thus the endless conflict may go on.
Now, what possible way of escape is there from this dilemma? I submit: The half-idealist must become a thoroughgoing idealist or nothing. He must assert: “Beyond experience there is, if anything, further experience.” And this further experience, so he must assert, is just as concrete, just as definite, as our own, and is real in the same sense in which our own is real. The proof that such experience exists beyond our own must rest, for the true idealist, in the first place, upon just the considerations that lead both half-idealist and realist to assert that our own experience, as something fragmentary, cannot be accepted alone, but implies its own complement. More deeply stated, the thesis of the idealist must be: — That our experience, as essentially imperfect, that is, as not fulfilling the very ideas which we ourselves have acquired in presence of this experience, demands from us statements as to whether these ideas are truly fulfilled or not. For instance, we have an ​idea of the whole world, as whole. No matter how we came by this idea, the question inevitably arises: Is there any whole world of fact at all, or is this fragment of experience before us all the fact that there is? Or, again, we have the general idea of experience, as such. The question arises: Is this experience before us the only experience? Or is there, as a matter of fact, other experience than this which is now presented? All such questions involve the general considerations upon which I laid stress in my chapter on “The Possibility of Error” (The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Chap. XI). Such questions have a definite answer, or they have no definite answer; and this is true, whatever our present state of knowledge. In other words, such questions, in themselves considered, can either be truly answered in one way, and in one way only, or they would admit, however much we knew, of no definite answer whatever. But in the latter case, the impossibility of giving any answer to them would become manifest to us, upon a large knowledge of truth, by virtue of facts that would then get presented to our insight, and that would then make obvious to us that there is something meaningless about the questions. Such facts could only get presented, however, to one who actually knew a larger whole of experience than is presented to us. And thus we can at least say, that already, at the present time, there is “possible experience” which, if presented, would throw light upon the meaninglessness of our questions concerning actual experience beyond our own. A fortiori, if our questions admit of definite answer, there is now ​“possible experience” that, if attained, would throw light upon the question as to what contents are actual beyond the now presented contents. Still more certainly can we say that either a true or a false answer to our questions, if now given, would be true or false by virtue of its agreement with contents that, if presented, would confirm or refute the supposed answer. Just so as regards the question concerning the present fulfilment of any other idea, such as the idea of the completeness of the world of experience, or the idea of a whole world of facts. All such questions, whether just now a definite answer for any one of them is true or false, or whether any one of them is a meaningless question, imply beyond our own experience a present “possibility of experience,” such as even now warrants the truth of some assertion in reply to each question. It is in this sense that our experience implies a beyond, and a beyond that, in the first place, appears as a world of definite “possible experience,” having a determinate, and in the end inevitably a true, total constitution. This total constitution it is impossible, however, to leave finally in the shape just given to it, without recognising, first, that our realist is right in demanding that all possibility shall have its ground in something beyond the mere feeling or assertion of the possibility itself; and, secondly, that the idealist is right in maintaining that nothing viewed as being beyond experience, in its wholeness, can be rationally asserted as a reality. The inevitable result is that the total constitution of the world of fact must be presented to a concrete whole of actual experience, of ​which ours is a fragment. The intimacy of the relation of our fragmentary experience to this total experience is indicated by the way in which our experience implies that total.
Thus the second argument of our realist is of actual service to the idealistic cause. The realist asserts that when one says: “A given experience is possible, but not here presented,” one inevitably holds that there is fact, both beyond the range of the fragmentary experience that is here and now present, and beyond the range of the bare assertion of the possibility itself. The realist is right. On the other hand, the half-idealist of our first statement of the case is right in maintaining that as soon as you define the beyond, and tell what you mean by it, you cannot make its nature incongruous with the conception “content of experience,” present or possible. The solution of the antinomy lies in asserting that the beyond is itself content of an actual experience, the experience to which the beyond is presented being in such intimate relation to the experience which asserts the possibility, that both must be viewed as aspects of one whole, fragments of one organisation. The realist, in so far as he is opposed to the half-idealist, is merely a thoroughgoing idealist who does not know his own mind. He rejects bare possibilities, in favour of something beyond them which is their ground. He is right. Only, this beyond is the Concrete Whole of an Absolute Experience, wherein the thoughts of all the possibilities of experience get their right interpretation, their just confirmation, or their refutation, — in a word, their fulfilment. ​
It must be observed that what is here said about the interpretation of experience in general, must inevitably apply to the ethical experiences and ideas upon which Professor Howison lays so much stress. An ethical fact, qua fact, possesses no advantage in logic over any other fact. When I assert the real variety, the moral independence, or any other sort of relative separation of the individuals of the moral world, I assert a fact which, whatever be the reasons for its assertion, must, as fact, be viewed either as beyond anybody’s experience or else as present to some experience; say, to the Absolute Experience. The former hypothesis leads me once more through all the stages of the foregoing argument. The latter hypothesis alone solves the logical problem of the real facts in question. However diverse, or separate, the moral individuals may be, the reality of their very separation itself is a fact which must be present in and for the unity of the Absolute Experience. This their separation is only relative. When Professor Howison asserts that, for any moral individual, his fellow, namely, any other moral individual, is a beyond, and as such inaccessible, he asserts precisely what an ordinary realist asserts concerning the nature of every fact not presented in concrete human experience. As against a half-idealist, who should attempt to reduce the contents of his neighbour’s inner life to mere possibilities of his own personal and private experience, Professor Howison is unquestionably right. But as against an Absolute Idealism, which admits that fact transcends the bare assertion of any real possibility of experience, but which recognises, ​for that very reason, that all fact, as such, has to be present to an Absolute Experience, Professor Howison’s ethical enthusiasm is logically defenceless. I agree that Individuality is a fact. I agree that it is an ethical fact. I agree that the fact of other individuality than mine is to me, in my private capacity, something transcendent. But such transcendence has many other examples, doubtless not so important, but nevertheless logically instructive. What happened last year, now has a reality which entirely transcends any moment of present experience, — inaccessibly transcends it, so that one in vain tries to state the true essence of the real past by converting it into mere present possibilities of experience; as, for example, by saying that the past means that if I were back there now, I should experience so and so. Such possibilities of experience do not express what the past as such is, and always henceforth will be, namely, essentially irrevocable. Even so, no attempt to transmute my neighbour’s real inner life into possibilities of my own experience is or can be successful, in so far as I am taken in my own finite and individual selfhood. But just as past and present, from an idealistic point of view, are fragments of the eternal Now, — of the Absolute Experience, — so the fact of the relative finite isolation of individuals is a real fact in so far as the Absolute Experience finds it to be such. What the source and ultimate nature of Individuality is, and whether the whole truth of Individuality is well expressed by calling it merely a fact present in the content of the Absolute Experience, is a question to be later considered. I agree with ​Professor Howison that there is another aspect to the world, in addition to the aspect upon which I have so far laid stress in this review. That the Absolute Experience is organically linked with an absolute Will and Love; that the contents of this Experience are not only facts, but chosen fulfilments of ideals; and that individuals are not only facts of the Absolute Experience, but expressions, embodiments, cases, — forms, if you will, — of the Absolute Love itself; all this I shall hereafter have occasion to consider. But here I am considering the world of fact in so far as it is fact, not in so far as it has value, or expresses the divine Will. And I insist that, viewed merely as fact, Individuality logically resembles any other fact, and that the real variety of individuals logically presupposes and depends upon the unity of the Absolute Experience, precisely as does any other real fact. Ethical Realism must stand or fall, just like other Realism; namely, as a relatively true, but fragmentary, expression of what an Absolute Idealism alone can express in truth.
V
THE THIRD ARGUMENT FOR REALISM: TRANSITION TO ABSOLUTE IDEALISM
“The most characteristic feature of our consciousness,” he may say, “in so far as our consciousness is rational, appears in our tendency to refer again and again, in our various successive thoughts, to what we call the ‘same’ object. To-day I see a house. I leave it, and to-morrow I return to the ‘same’ house. My friend whom I meet to-day is the ‘same’ man whom I met yesterday. I myself am the ‘same’ person at various times. These are ordinary assumptions of common-sense. Nor is it possible to deal at all with our experience without making such assumptions. One may be a sceptic, and may assert that possibly what I call the ‘same’ house or the ‘same’ man, on various occasions, is only in seeming the same. Notoriously more difficult it is to suppose, even in a sceptical mood, that I myself am not the same self as I was. But scepticism often can and does extend to at least a formal doubt or denial of some aspect of the ‘unity of apperception’ in various successive thoughts. Yet even such scepticism must come to a limit somewhere. When I say ‘A given proposition is now true,’ even if it be only the proposition that ‘I feel warm,’ or that ‘rain falls,’ I am able to assert that this proposition will always be true of that moment in which its truth was experienced. And this implies at least the possibility that, whether or no memory ever afterwards accurately serves me, an assertion should later be made which shall have this moment for its object; so that many assertions are thenceforth possible which shall refer to this same moment, although the assertions themselves may be made at very various times. Now,” ​as one may continue, “there is nothing about the later judgments and their contents which of itself contains or explains this relation of reference of the later judgments to the same object. The object may, by hypothesis, be one that, in its time, was a presented content of experience. But neither the original object or content, nor the later judgments about it, can be said to contain, as parts, — that is, as facts of experience, — that relation of reference which makes them all judgments about the same facts. Still more impossible is it to reduce to any mere contents of human experience the relation that we have in mind when we say, or conceive, that, as a fact, many people can at the same time refer to the same objects, or, at various times, can think of the same objects. An idealist may undertake to say, as much as he pleases, that what, in its time, was called the Battle of Marathon was a mere mass of contents of experience in the minds of the Greeks and Persians concerned. He may try to deny that the swords, javelins, and horses present were in any sense transcendently real objects, external to anybody’s experience. But what the idealist cannot explain, or even express in his terms, is how various schoolboys to-day, various poets and orators in successive ages, various historians, scholars, archaeologists, can all think, read, learn, dispute, about the same event, namely, the Battle of Marathon itself. For the battle, when now thought of, is no longer presented experience for anybody. Nor (and this is of special importance) is one man’s inner thought or experience, which in him represents the Battle of Marathon, in the faintest degree identical with the thought ​or experience which another man has in mind when he refers to the Battle of Marathon. Thus many think of the same battle, but the contents of experience in many minds are not the same, and need not even be very similar. In vain,” so our realist may add, “does an idealist attempt, in such cases, to take refuge afresh in scepticism, and merely to doubt whether we all are really referring to the same Battle of Marathon at all. For, as said, scepticism of this sort must find in the end its limit. One is unable to reason through the whole of even one sentence — one is unable to state even the most extreme of scepticism — with any coherence, without assuming that many successive thoughts can refer to the same object. And one is unable to carry out the least act of social intercourse without assuming that A and B, the persons concerned, see, touch, pass from one to another, or otherwise deal with, the same object. Experience, as such, is indeed a world of Heraclitean flux. But the conditions which make many moments of experience, many thoughts, or many people, refer to the same content or moment of experience, or to the same fact in any sense, are not themselves, as conditions of the sameness of reference, contents of anybody’s experience, or part of the flow of its ceaseless stream. These conditions, then, presupposed in all rationality, are ipso facto transcendent. In brief, then: The sameness of the objects of experience, in so far as these objects can be thought of at various times, can be referred to by various subjects, can be objects for many points of view, demands that at least the relations whereby this same reference is secured, if not the facts themselves ​to which reference is made, should transcend the stream of experience itself, and should be really external to it. Into the stream of experience, as into the flux of Heraclitus, nobody descends twice at the same point. If, however, the sameness of reference is still possible, whereby many experiences bear upon, many thoughts portray, the same content of fact, existent beyond them all, then the relations of reference, if not the facts referred to, must be real beyond all experience.”
Our realist might combine the present line of argument with the one which, in the foregoing discussion, he used to expound his second consideration. He might insist that whoever speaks of an object of possible experience not now presented, implies that this object is such that, were it converted into presentation, this presentation would somehow be knowable as identical with, as the same as, the object defined before presentation. If I see the light yonder on the horizon, and guess that it is a fire, the half-idealist of the foregoing discussion defines my object as my possible further experience of flame or heat in case I should approach the light. But, as our realist may now maintain, the experience which I should have if I approached the fire would not fulfil the defined possibility of experience, asserted by one who sees the light upon the horizon, unless one could say that, upon approach, he found the same light gradually expanding into the expected experience of fire, and unless he found that the fire later experienced was somehow the same as the fire expected. Without the category of Sameness, in the objects of concrete ex​perience, and in the objects of our thoughts about possible experience at various times, the whole theory about possibilities of experience would be meaningless. Yet nowhere in our flowing experience does the sameness, which the half-idealist also presupposes, ever get adequately and finally presented. Nor could it be presented to any temporal experience similar to our own. Thus afresh may the realist maintain that the sameness of our objects logically involves their transcendence.
This argument from the sameness of the objects of various experiences and thoughts — a sameness required indeed by all rationality — is probably the strongest, and, properly viewed, the most enlightening, of realistic arguments. It is not, like the earliest arguments mentioned in the foregoing discussion, a mere appeal to common-sense prejudices. It is an appeal to something that the utmost scepticism, if articulate, not only admits, but asserts; namely, that various judgments and moments of experience can mean the same objects. Without this assertion, no criticism of a thesis, no sceptical rejection of a theory, no doubt about the power of our thought to know truth, can be seriously stated or definitely maintained. If one wants the ultimate truth regarding what motive it is that forces us to transcend our fragmentary experience, in idea if not in fact, and to seek in the beyond for something missing in the stream of consciousness, nowhere can one better satisfy one’s curiosity than in taking account of this aspect of experience and of this motive in favour of transcendence. On the other hand, no one of the realistic ​arguments is more adapted for an immediate transformation into the form, not of the half-idealism above considered, but of the Absolute Idealism maintained in my original paper, and in the immediately previous section of the present argument. The situation is this: Moments or persons, experiences or thoughts, themselves numerically different, can refer to and mean the same object external to them all. Now, wherein consists this sameness of reference? Is it conceivably a fact that can transcend all experience? By hypothesis it does transcend our experience, as such. But is ours all? The moments in question have, in themselves, by hypothesis, only a fragment of a meaning present to them. The rest of this meaning, and (be it noted) of their own meaning, is beyond them. But a meaning, as the meaning of a thought referring to an object, is a sort of fact that, by definition, can have no meaning, cannot be this sort of fact, except for consciousness, i.e. except when it is experienced as a meaning. A fact supposed to be transcendent to all consciousness might well be an x but could not well be that unique and definite relationship which is presented to us whenever the meaning, or objective reference of our thoughts, is not fragmentary, but is, relatively speaking, within our own range of experience. Moments, or persons, or thoughts, a, b, and c, mean, let us say, — that is, refer to, — the same object O. That is, in nature, a perfectly obvious kind of relation. For if a, b, and c are present with the object O as moments or factors in the same whole unity of consciousness, then indeed we are aware what the relation is. In our own experience we are sufficiently ​accustomed to such cases. Thus, for example, in one conscious moment I may observe two thoughts of mine referring to the same object; as when, in logic, I compare two judgments, or, in a considerate mood, balance two opinions relating to the same subject-matter. What the relation that thus constitutes the common meaning of two thoughts is, I in such cases directly observe. But, now, how could such a relation exist, unobserved by any consciousness, and forming no content of any experience? Here surely, if anywhere, is a sort of fact whose esse is percipi, whose nature it is to be known. If it is the universal presupposition of rationality that just such a relation may, and in practice constantly does, bind many moments in my own flowing experience to the same object, not presented in any one of those moments, then the only way in which this relation can be interpreted is to suppose that all these moments are really fragments of one Unity of Consciousness, of a Unity not bound to the limitations of our own flow of successive and numerically separate experiences, although inclusive, both of this flow, and of these various experiences themselves, — in their very fragmentariness, — but also in their relationships.
It is indeed common enough for the realist to conceive his transcendent objects as remaining the same objects through a long series of moments of time. Time flows, and they, he says, persist as the same “things in themselves.” This view is indeed, in any of its forms, a hopeless abstraction so long as the objects are mere “things in themselves.” But its abstractness becomes peculiarly manifest when this ​so-called same object is explicitly defined as being the same for many thinkers or knowers; that is, as being the same just in so far forth as many moments stand to it in the relation of meaning it, despite their own supposed mutual separateness, and their isolation from this their common object. For the relation of meaning, or referring to, an object is confessedly unique. It is a relation whereof one fragment is presented as a fact of experience in the very inner intent of the moment that knows or refers to the object. This, so to speak, is the moment which possesses the empirically conscious end, or aspect, of the supposed meaning. And the relation of reference or meaning is such, in its objective capacity, and in its wholeness, as to fulfil that subjective intent of the moment. But how? Answer: In precisely such wise as such an intent is fulfilled when, in an empirical unity of consciousness, a moment that means an object is found present together with the object meant, and is found to be related thereto in the well-known fashion that exemplifies this unique relation of reference itself. To suppose such a relation objectively realised without a transcendent objective unity of consciousness in which it is realised, is to suppose a question answered without an answer being given, a wish fulfilled without any concrete fact of fulfilment. In brief, an objective relation of meaning or reference, existing apart from any unity of consciousness, is precisely like an unfelt pain or an undesired object of desire.
The value of the realist’s argument is here once more the fact that its consideration forces Idealism ​to become absolute. Nor is the present argument without application to the considerations suggested by such an Ethical Realism as Professor Howison’s. In the definition of the ethical significance of the independent individuals that constitute Professor Howison’s “City of God,” it is evident that much stress must be laid upon the fact that any ethical individual remains, as to his independence and as to his rights, logically the same eternal object for all the various other beings that constitute his fellow-citizens. In Professor Howison’s account, moreover, the “City of God” itself, to which the various subjects, rejecting all monistic frivolity, retain what Professor Howison calls a “stainless allegiance,” is obviously, both as ideal and as eternal ethical reality, the same for all, being both their object, to whose laws they mean to conform, and the reality wherein their moral aims are fulfilled. Now this, as it stands, is Realism. The ethical dignity of the contents of the real objects, whose independence and sameness is presupposed, does not alter in the least the logical character of the category involved. Logic is not ethics, but the ethical categories must be logical. And the logical status of the foregoing concept is obvious. One independent moral agent is, by virtue of his independence, no mere object in the experience of any other agent. The “City of God,” as such, is nobody’s experience, not even God’s. But, in the moral world, various free-agents can and should unite in recognising the rights of any one moral agent as the same for them all. And the “City of God,” as reality, is the same for all, gods and men. The consequence ​is, that the objects so far referred to in this statement of Professor Howison’s Ethical Realism are essentially transcendent objects. The free-agents, and the constitution of their “City,” belong to the realm of “things in themselves.” The “stainless allegiance” aforesaid is, logically speaking, nothing but an ordinary Realism. The ordinary materialist has his own kind of “stainless allegiance” to “matter in motion.” Spencer entertains similarly devout sentiments towards the “Unknowable,” and all such thinkers show in common with Professor Howison a tardiness in defining what they mean by their ultimate relation to that very object which, as they aver, they above all do mean. To be “unstained” by reflective definition may be an ethical virtue, but cannot be a logical recommendation of a fundamental philosophical concept. As a fact, all this Realism, when duly considered, becomes either Absolute Idealism or nothing. The “things in themselves,” whether they are atoms, or Unknowables, or free-agents, or the “City of God,” must be in one unity of consciousness with the thoughts that mean them, with the acts of devotion that offer allegiance to them, with the ideals that strive after them, with the agents that undertake to serve them. For if not, the concept of Reality has no meaning, philosophy has served us no whit, and we are yet in our sins. ​
PART II THE CONCEPTION OF WILL AND ITS RELATION TO THE ABSOLUTE
In the foregoing discussion, as well as in my original paper, a theory of the Absolute has been defined whose essence can now be briefly restated thus: Our experience, as it comes, is essentially fragmentary. This fragmentariness is not an accidental defect of an experience such as is ours. It is an essential defect of all finite experience. In other words, you cannot suppose our experience, as it is, to be, or to contain, the whole of what we refer to when we speak of the real, unless you are willing to fall prey to a logical contradiction.
A sceptic might indeed be supposed to say: “What I now and here immediately experience may be the whole of reality.” But such a sceptic, if he tries to state this view coherently, finds the hypothesis in question simply contradictory. For what he means may be, first, the well-known assertion: “I can mean to refer, in genuine truth, to no object except what is now present to me as the object here meant. Hence I can never really think, much less verify the thought, of an object beyond, i.e. not now present to me.” But hereupon we at once reply to the sceptic, that in raising his question he already ​has thought of the beyond, or has meant to mean — that is, to refer to — that very sort of object which he sceptically calls in question. If the sceptic retorts: “One may imagine that one is referring to the real beyond, but in fact one can only refer to contents immediately presented in consciousness,” then we reply that the very admission of the sceptic is fatal to his own thesis; for if one can imagine that one means what one does not really mean, the incongruity between an imagined meaning, present to consciousness, and one’s real meaning, which is not present to consciousness so long as the imaginary meaning takes its place, already implies the reality of meanings when they are not present to this single moment of consciousness; and this implication already involves the sceptic in the admission both that the beyond can be, and that it can be meant even while it is beyond. If the sceptic hereupon admits that one may really mean the beyond, but may not know whether in truth there is a beyond, this reference to what is in truth is itself an admission of a real beyond; namely, precisely that which is in truth.
The beyond, then, is logically implied in the presented, and so far the realist is right. As we have seen, the half-idealist of our earlier statement is equally right in insisting that whatever beyond you admit or define must be interpreted in terms of possible experience. Now the beyond that we are actually forced to define as the content of reality has appeared in the foregoing discussion (1) as that which, if presented in experience, would answer truly all rational questions. It has appeared (2) as that ​whose constitution, as a true constitution, must furnish an object which is ultimately the same for all points of view, and which fulfils the meaning of all assertions that may be made regarding reality. We have seen that both these definitions of the beyond require that its contents and character and meaning should be present in one unity of consciousness with all the moments and contents of finite thought and experience. Reality thus, so far, appears as Absolute Experience, together with all that content and constitution which shall prove to be necessary for the definition of an Absolute Experience.
The concept of an Absolute Experience, thus generally defined, has been further sketched, although briefly, in my original paper. It is a conception as inevitable from one point of view as it is naturally open to inquiry and more or less plausible objection from another point of view. The problem how to conceive an Experience sufficient unto itself, involving and including not only such experiences as ours, such thoughts as we frame, but a complete system of finished thought, a wealth of contents such as to fulfil this system of ideas in the completest manner logically conceivable, — this problem is obviously an extremely difficult one. It is one thing to show the necessity of such a conception, another to develope positively its implications. As a fact, it will not be surprising if in this development new aspects, besides those of thought and experience, prove to be necessary in order to complete the very conception of an Absolute Experience conceived as a concrete whole. In fact an Absolute Experience, in order to be such, ​must unquestionably involve other aspects than those which are directly suggested by the word “experience.” And, in my original paper, I expressly observed that this must be the fact; or, in other words, that the divine Omniscience must involve other attributes than Omniscience alone.
The essential feature of the foregoing account may be expressed by saying that all facts, all thoughts, all fulfilments of thoughts, — in a word, all truth, — must be present to and in the unity of one Divine or Absolute Consciousness, precisely as, in one of our own moments, many data and many aspects are together in the unity of such a moment. But this concept of the “Eternal Now,” of the “One Moment,” as the character of the Absolute when viewed as the All-Knower, is so far an extremely abstract conception. One has every right to ask: Has the Absolute no other characters than this? Does the Absolute only know? Or does he also will? Is our Absolute a purely theoretical being? Or does perfect knowledge imply more than mere knowledge?
The purpose of this Second Part of my present paper is to answer in part this very question, by considering the relation of a conception, first carefully generalised from our concept of Will, to the now defined conception of the Absolute. The discussion will here consist of two subdivisions. In the first, I shall consider the general conception of Will, trying to distinguish therein the most essential from the more accidental features of our human experience of what we call Will. In the second, I shall reconsider the conception of an “Absolute Experi​ence,” or of “a complete knowledge of all truth in the unity of a single moment,” in order to discover whether such a conception does not involve the presence of some generalised form of Will as a factor in the Absolute Experience itself.
To define the Absolute as the Omniscient Being, or as the All-knowing Moment, or Instant, is, as I hold, the best beginning for an idealistic doctrine. But I do not regard such a definition as other than a beginning. Our mode of progress must, however, be as follows: We must develope our already attained conception of the Absolute, not by arbitrary external additions, but by essentially immanent methods. As the implications of ordinary experience led us to the conception of an Absolute Experience, so the implications of this latter conception must lead us to look for factors or moments whereby we may complete the purely theoretical definition. As a fact, the conception of an experience wherein an absolute system of ideas gets a fulfilment, and wherein all truth forms the content of a single whole moment, demands, for its own completion, the presence of a factor whereby the Individual Whole of the Absolute Moment gets a more positive definition than we have yet given it. This new factor, whereby the unity of the Absolute Consciousness gets its positive definition and its individuality, we shall see reason to call the Absolute Will. ​
I THE ESSENTIAL AND THE NON-ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF THE WILL
The popular conception of Will, derived from our inner experience, contains, amongst others, three groups of elements that I here wish merely to mention at the outset. The relation of these elements is a matter about which our ordinary consciousness is not very clear, and people differ a great deal as to what element they regard as essential to the conception of the will. These elements are respectively: Desire, Choice, and Efficacious Effort.
Desire is a name for feelings that can arise in our minds with very various degrees of vigour and clearness. I can desire without knowing what it is that I desire. I can have contradictory desires. I can desire without the least hope of being able to satisfy my desire. I can desire unreasonably. I can desire capriciously. On the other hand, unless I first desire, I shall never get any of the more complex and rational processes of the will. Desire is related to developed will in rational agents as sense-data are related to perceptions.
Choice is a name for a much more rational and derivative mental process. Plainly, we must learn to choose, and that, too, very slowly. When I choose, I must have desires. I must, however, already know something about what I call the worth, the rational relations, the significance, of these desires. Only through experience do I get the data for such know​ledge. And so my choice is never identical with any primary desire as such. Choice is a mental process that involves the presence of plans for the satisfaction of desires, a foreknowledge of relatively objective ends that constitute the conscious aims of these desires, a more or less reasonable estimate of the value of these aims, and then some process which involves the survival of some, the subordination, or perhaps the suppression, of other desires.
So much for the second element of the human will. For some writers, choice has seemed the essential element of the will. The Effectiveness of one’s choice such writers have regarded as a fact relatively external to the will. Kant’s “man of the good will” would be a being of rational choices, but he would remain just as reasonable, and so just as much a man of good will, if Nature were henceforth always to thwart his intents. But many others have regarded the will’s actual Effectiveness, our third element, as belonging, in a measure, to the essence, rather than to the accidents, of the voluntary process. Those countless writers who have regarded our voluntary bodily acts as the primal instances, in our experience, of the true relation of cause and effect, seem to regard the will as primarily a phenomenon of Efficacious Effort. And as a fact, in normal cases, to will and to observe that our efforts are to a certain degree efficacious, at least in controlling bodily movements, or in directing the course of our inner life, are actually very closely related processes. Thus, for instance, I cannot now will to celebrate next Christmas, since I cannot by present deeds ​transport myself to next Christmas. That I can only desire. But I can will to begin planning and preparing for Christmas. And just so I can now will to express myself in these words, and behold, in one popular sense of the word “will,” the will is the deed.
Here is no place for a psychological analysis of these three aspects of what is popularly regarded as volition. But one may say, at once, that all three aspects come to us, primarily, as facts of human experience, coloured through and through by the special conditions of our human mental life. For instance, the phenomena felt by us as the phenomena of efficacious effort are, as is now known, not the phenomena that cause our voluntary acts, so much as the mere effects of conduct. The sense of efficacious effort is very largely, if not wholly, due to kinaesthetic sensory states, of widely varied peripheral origin, — muscle, joint, skin sensations, visual experiences, sensations of breathing, of general bodily movement, etc.; states which really result either from the acts that they seem to produce or from our mere memories of the results of former deeds. Such states no more throw light upon any metaphysical efficaciousness of the will than the sense of smell informs us as to the doings of the archangels. But the numerous writers who have conceived our experiences of efficacious effort as in themselves apt to reveal the very essence of the relation of cause and effect have too readily applied these same human experiences to the purpose of conceiving even the very essence of the Divine Will, and the relation between the Creator’s act and the world’s processes, as seen from ​the Divine point of view. For such writers, God’s Will, through an unconscious misuse of the psychological facts, actually often gets predominantly defined in terms of our muscle and joint sensations, — a process as enlightening as if you should attribute to the All-seeing Eye the possession of our systems of after-images.
In brief, then, while it is perfectly true that our conceptions of an Absolute Thought and Experience, as well as the conception which we now seek to define, are all attained through a process of generalising from the types of thought and experience and will that we know, it is necessary to be careful in finding the motives that can warrant any such generalisation. Our right to our earlier generalisations in this paper has been as follows: Of the characteristics of our own inner life, there are two which primarily lend themselves to generalisation when we try to form the conception of some experience more inclusive or exalted than our own. These characteristics are the possession of thought, and the presence of contents or of data such as fulfil the ideas of thought, and give them concreteness. A being higher than ourselves in conscious grade must know, — of that we seem at once sure. And to know, is, on the other hand, to find ideas expressed in contents. For truth means idea fulfilled in fact. And one who knows, knows truth. But while such a formal generalisation of the essence of our own experience is common to all efforts to define the Absolute as above us in conscious grade, it is much harder to generalise accurately the phenomena of such a complex and ​human a structure as is our will, — this labyrinth of desires, lighted by choice, and illustrated by a constantly accompanying language of bodily deeds, which in their turn are coloured by a normal, but in us certainly largely illusory, sense of power and of free control. Surely, if any being above our grade is to be conceived as having Will, we must not expect to find his will as confused an affair as is our own, and we must know why we attribute to him any such attribute at all.
As a fact, however, no one of these three aspects, as such, makes clear to us the deeper essence of the will. Another aspect, the frequent topic of a now pretty familiar psychological analysis, will be still more useful to us when we proceed to an effort to re-examine the conception of the Absolute with an ultimate reference to its possession of Will. Despite the complexity of the product that we call “the will,” there is still one element of it which is constantly present in all grades of volition, and which has a central significance in our voluntary experience. And this is the element which we call Attention.
Our voluntary processes, as we may here take interest in observing, are, in all their grades, selective rather than inventive. You can will nothing original, — no novel act, — nothing except what you have already and involuntarily learned to do; and that, however much you may desire or wish to be original. You can will to do, I say, what you have already somehow learned to do, before your will acts. I am indeed popularly said to be able to will to commit an absolutely new act; as when a lover first wills to win his ​beloved, or a man in despair wills to commit suicide. But in such cases one really wills an already familiar deed, — such as jumping into the water, or making to a lady such pretty speeches as one already knows how to make. In these cases, it is the situation that is novel, not the act really willed. I repeat, the will is wholly unoriginal. But, on the other hand, when you will, you turn possibility into actuality by dwelling upon one or another various already known and abstractly conceivable possibilities. The essence of the will is here not inventiveness, but attention. Choice is explicitly an attentive selection of one conceived possibility as that upon which you dwell, as against opposing possibilities. Even Desire, in its least rational forms, involves this element of attentive favouring of one conscious content as against a more or less dimly recognised background of other contents. In case of efficacious bodily efforts, you always attend closely to the deed that you most try to perform. Surely if one defined Will, apart from its endless human complications, as a process involving attention to one conscious content rather than to another, or, on higher levels, as the preference of a datum attended to, as over against data that remain, relatively speaking, merely ideal or possible objects of attention, — one would have a preliminary definition that would promise most as a basis for wider generalisation.
Our conception of Will thus once generalised, it remains to re-examine our conception of the Absolute, in order to see whether the conception of a complete Whole of Experience does not involve, as one of its moments, a factor worthy of the name “Will.” ​
II THE RELATION OF THE WILL TO THE ABSOLUTE
Our finite experience, as it comes, is theoretically incomplete in two senses: (1) in that it does not contain the contents which would be needed to meet the ideas and ideal questions that it arouses in us; and (2) in that the contents which it already contains are not, in general, sufficiently clear to our judging thought. On the one side, then, in our experience the contents are not enough to satisfy the ideas which they actually arouse, and we ask: What else is needed in order to complete this collection of contents? On the other side, our ideas are not yet adequate to the present contents, and we ask: What else is needed in order to give us a complete account of what is presented?
Now the World-Consciousness, which, in our foregoing account, we have defined as inevitably actual, cannot be incomplete in the second of these senses. For it experiences, so we have said, all that is real regarding its own contents; in other words, it must know its own contents through and through. Its ideas must be adequate to its presentations. But one may still ask: Is it not inevitably incomplete in the first sense? Must it not have ideas of possible contents that it does not possess? Must not its ideas go beyond its contents?
At a first glance, this would seem indeed logically inevitable. It is of the nature of pure or abstract thinking to deal with endless possibilities, with ideas ​which transcend all finite actuality of presentation and which so remain bare possibilities. Of this character of abstract thought the higher mathematical sciences are one long series of examples. Let a line be given; abstract thought can define in this line points as places where the line would be broken, mere positions without magnitude. The presented continuity of the line often seems to threaten to disappear into the endless multitude of these points. How many such points are there on a line? No possible presentation could exhaust this number. The mathematical ideal limits, of the type well known in higher mathematics, are other examples of the way in which thought can define the infinitely remote goal of a process which can never be constructively presented as a complete whole. Experience always determines the infinite universals of thought to concrete individual examples. Thought, on the other hand, even when it defines the contents of experience, always does so by viewing them as individual cases of an infinite series of possible cases.
So then, apparently, thought would transcend any possible whole of experience. There could be no experience to which was presented the concrete realisation of all that thought could and would regard as possible. For such an experience would have, for instance, to view a line as an infinite aggregate of points, adequately composing, despite their discreteness, that continuity of the line in which thought now declares that they could always possibly be found, as filling every place in it. Such an experience, exhausting all thought’s possibilities, would have to ​experience all the consequences that would have followed had the Persians won at Marathon, or had the Turks overrun Europe. Endless would be the enumerations of even the possible types of possibility that thought would seem to be capable of presenting to an experience which undertook the task of tracing out every infinite regress, every chasing of an ideal limit, every altering of a variable of experience such as thought can declare to be possible. No, surely, there can be no concrete experiences capable of exhausting thought’s possibilities.
On the contrary, however, one may indeed argue, as we have already done, that a true thought, even about a bare possibility, is simply an expression, in thought’s terms, of something which, just so far as it is true, must be somewhere presented to a concrete experience. This result is in fact inevitable unless, indeed, one is prepared to abandon the fundamental propositions: (1) that experience is an eternally real aspect of truth, and the highest court of appeal when ideas seek for facts, and (2) the accompanying proposition, that whatever is, is somewhere presented.
Here, then, are two views of the relation of thought to experience in the unity of a World-Experience. Are they reconcilable? The one asserts that a World-Experience, since it would inevitably think of possibilities that were not realised in its presentations, would transcend its own content by virtue of its own ideas, and so would be, from an ideal point of view, a relatively incomplete experience. The other asserts that, since bare possibilities are as good as impossibilities, and since true thoughts are true because they ​express the nature of something that experience realises, and since even a possibility, if it is genuine, must be represented in experience, an Absolute Experience would have concretely to fulfil all possibilities whose essence was not illusory. Here is a new antinomy in our concept of the Absolute. How shall we deal with it?
The actual reconciliation of these two abstractly opposed points of view is rendered easier by the fact that our experience already, in its measure, exemplifies their reconciliation. And first, here, let us note that a truth manifest in experience can often have its very essence expressed by a hypothetical judgment whose hypothesis is contrary to the fact expressed. “If wishes were horses, beggars might ride.” This is not an idle speculation, but a quaint expression, in relatively abstract terms, of the experienced fact that to desire a horse is one thing, to have a horse is quite another. Two facts of experience, m and n, stand before us in sharp contrast. We want to express the contrast. But the facts, as given, are complex. We analyse their structure, and thoughtfully discover that while m contains the elements p and q, n contains the related but contrasting elements p' and q'. We also observe that p and q, p' and q', are couples, whose respective members are closely linked by some law. We express our discovery by the hypothetical proposition that if p, in m, were transformed into p', then of necessity q would be transformed into q' and our experience would contain not the contrast between m and n, but a pair of n’s, very much alike. The hypothesis is contrary to fact; but the nature of the ​actual contrast has been expressed by its assertion. The hypothetical judgment is now experienced as true, although the possibility that it asserts is experienced as unreal.
Still more obvious is the matter, when we treat of an intention. “If you ask me no questions, I will tell you no lies,” says a person more concerned to be discreet than to be truthful. Here, in experience, the possibility suggested may or may not be realised. But in either case the hypothetical judgment may express the essence of this person’s intent. “I could not do that,” says a conscientious man in presence of a rejected temptation; “that, if I did it, would be a crime.” Here is the very contrast between what the intent expresses, as the purpose of this man, and the actions, perhaps common enough in other men, with which he contrasts his intent, — it is this very contrast, I say, which is expressed by an hypothesis whose possible reality, if given, would destroy this contrast.
In general, if I am describing situations or other really experienced data, whose characters are relatively individual, that is, unique, and are sundered out from a background, so that the individual objects that I am describing are to be contrasted definitely with other individuals, then I can and do express one aspect, at least, of the very nature of this individuality, of this contrast, by making hypotheses contrary to fact concerning the way in which this contrast might be reduced or annulled, and this individuality lost in the mere background of universality from which it is differentiated. And the more completely ​unique the individuals in question are, the more I may be limited, in my thinking, to this negative method of characterising them. In fact, the hypothesis contrary to fact might be called, logically, the judgment of differentiation, or of at least one aspect of definite individuation. For how can I better express at least one aspect of the contrast, the sundering, between individuals of the same species, than by showing that, if such and such discoverable characters of these individuals were varied so and so, the sundering of these individuals would tend to disappear, and their present individuality would tend to lapse into a merely specific resemblance? If “Dorothy Q.” had said No on a certain occasion, the poet would have been, at best, just such and such a fraction different from what he now is. But what he now is, his individuality, is involved in the world in which “Dorothy Q.” said Yes. If the Persians had won at Marathon, then, as far as we can see, Europe might have become politically less distinguishable from Asia. But the individuality of European civilisation involves, as one differentiating feature, the fact that the Greeks won at Marathon.
If, then, hypotheses contrary to fact can be present as expressions of concrete truth to an experience that faces truth, the presence of such hypotheses contrary to fact is not excluded from an Absolute Experience, even in so far as it is absolute. And now the presence of such hypotheses as elements of an Absolute Experience would, in the next place, reconcile our two conflicting views as to the relation of idea and content in such an Absolute Experience. Ideas must ​always transcend content, even in an Absolute Experience? Yes, as abstract or unreal ideas, for the reason before pointed out. No actual experience could adequately fulfil, or present contents adequately expressing, the infinite regresses, the infinitely infinite groups of possible examples of every universal, whose abstract possibility a merely abstract thought demands. Ideas, then, must indeed in one sense transcend data even in an Absolute Experience. But how? Answer: As hypotheses contrary to fact, not as expressions of genuine and unfulfilled truth. But what sort of Absolute Experience would that be, in which there were ideas present as hypotheses contrary to fact, as bare or unreal possibilities?
I answer, it would be an experience of fact as individual cases, exemplifying universal types in such a fashion as to embody a knowledge of the essence both of these facts and of their types. So far, it would then be an experience of a concrete and individual fulfilment of all genuine ideas. On the other hand, this fulfilment would embody universals, not in all abstractly or barely possible cases, — since that would be, concretely speaking, impossible, — but in contents sharply differentiated from one another, and thereby preserved from lapsing into the bare continuity which would link together the series of abstractly possible contents such as could be defined through mere ideas. To exemplify: You know the nature of a geometrical line only when you know that it does contain series of points. This you can only concretely know in so far as you construct actual points on the line. But the points that you actually ​construct are a few only of the infinitely infinite series of abstractly possible points. Your idea of these possible points transcends any actual series. Yet the actually constructed series of points (1) exemplifies or embodies the nature common to all the abstractly possible points, and (2) furnishes to your experience a discrete series of points, between which other points would be possible in idea, while in concrete fact they are not experienced. Now an Absolute Experience of the points on the line could in the end do nothing but exemplify, on some level, just this same process of experience.
So, then, an Absolute Experience could and would at once find its ideas adequately fulfilled in concrete fact, and also find this fulfilment as an individual collection of individuals exemplifying these ideas, while, as to other abstractly possible fulfilments of the same ideas, the Absolute Experience would find them as hypothetical or ideal entities, contrary to fact.
But to say this is to attribute to the Absolute Experience a character apparently identical in essence, not with the psychological accidents of our volitional experience, or even of our attention, but with one of the aspects that make our attention rationally significant. To attend involves, apart from the psychological accidents of the process, this rationally significant act, viz., the act of finding a universal type, or idea, exemplified by a datum of experience, while other possible data, that might exemplify this general type, are, relatively speaking, ignored. The idea of seeing is exemplified in seeing this object at the centre of the field of vision. The better one sees this individ​ual object, the better is one’s general power of vision. “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister.” In general, attention, in one aspect of its significance, is an ignoring of possible experiences for the sake of fulfilling, in sharply differentiated individual experiences, ideas that could not be fulfilled except through the ignoring of such possibilities. Attention is thus sacrifice of ideal possibilities for the sake of realising ideas. It is losing to win — losing bare abstractions to find concrete life. But the concrete life found is a life full of contrasting individuals, of sharply differentiated fact, of discrete realities.
To the Absolute Experience, then, we should attribute just such a generalised form of the process that in us appears, clouded by countless psychological accidents, as the process of attention; just such an individuation of its contents, just such an attentive precision, whereby its universal types get discrete expression. Yet one comment is still needed in this connexion. This generalised form of attention, which we attribute to the Absolute Experience, is now conceived by us as that aspect of this Absolute which, in the total movement of the world’s unity, determines the ideas to find this concrete realisation which they do find. It follows, that, while the attentive process or aspect of this Whole Experience has to be conceived as fulfilling ideas, and so as counter to no idea, — and therefore as in this aspect absolutely rational, — on the other hand, this attentive aspect cannot be conceived as determined by any of the ideas, or by the thought-aspect of the Absolute in its wholeness, or as necessitated by thought, to attend ​thus or so. In this sense the attentive aspect of the Absolute Experience appears as itself possessed of absolute Freedom. That it shall realise or adequately fulfil the ideas, is, from our point of view, when we define it, necessary. Nor can it leave unfulfilled any true idea. But on the other hand, what individual fulfilment it gives these ideas, the ideas themselves cannot predestinate. In this sense, the individuality, the concrete reality, of the contents of the Absolute Experience must be conceived as on the one hand fulfilling ideas, but as on the other hand freely, unconstrainedly, — if you will, capriciously, — embodying their universality in the very fact of the presence of this life, this experience, this world.
In this completion of our conception of the Absolute Experience, we now see sufficient reason to speak, in a generalised sense, of a World-Will, as absolutely free, and still as absolutely rational. This Will we can regard, if you choose sufficiently to spiritualise your term, as the World-Creator, but not as if the creation were an abstractly separable act, existent apart from the world's existence, and not as if this creation were, properly speaking, a causal process. The Divine Will is simply that aspect of the Absolute which is expressed in the concrete and differentiated individuality of the world. Hereby the world appears, not as a barely abstract world of pure ideas, but as a world of manifested individuals, known in the unity of the one transcendent moment of the Absolute Experience, but there known as a discrete and clearly contrasted collection of beings, whose ​presence everywhere expresses, amid all the wealth of meaning which the whole embodies, an element of transcendent Freedom.
III GENERAL REVIEW OF THE ARGUMENT
Our proposed supplement to our conception of the Absolute invites a fresh review of the whole argument in a somewhat new light. For the foregoing effort to introduce into our conception of the Absolute the element of Will differs from the customary effort in several noteworthy ways. No stress is laid, for instance, in this deduction, upon the ordinary forms of the category of Causation. That is, we do not regard the Absolute Will as primarily something that is required in order to explain the causal source or origin of the world of fact. All conceptions of source, of origin, and of causation are relative conceptions, which apply only to specified regions or spheres within the whole of reality. The conception of causation does not apply to the whole of reality itself. The same thing could be remarked as to the question whether the element of Will is an objectively necessary factor in the Absolute, i.e. whether the Absolute must will. For, from an absolute point of view, necessity, causation, determination, and all other forms of relative dependence appear as partial facts within the whole. In the last analysis, in fact, one cannot say: The world, or reality, or the Absolute, must be; but only: The reality, the Absolute, the world, is. Fact is always superior to necessity, and ​the highest expression of truth in terms of thought is inevitably the categorical judgment rather than the hypothetical, the assertory judgment rather than the apodictic. For that very reason all assertions such as “A requires for its explanation, or for its cause, something else, namely, B,” must be subordinate to the ultimate assertion, “The whole world of given fact is.” When, in the first section of this paper, we interpreted the implications of finite experience, and found that, in order to avoid contradiction, all finite experience must be regarded as a fragment of a whole, whose content is present in the unity of consciousness of one absolute moment, — in all this we did not assert that the contents of finite experience need an external cause, or that the Absolute is the cause of the relative. We declared that the Absolute is the whole system of which the finite experience is a moment or a fragment. Therefore, our Absolute in no sense explains the world as a cause, but possesses the world of fact, precisely as fact. In this sense, the constitution of reality is indeed, from the absolute point of view, something that, despite all the mediations, the relationships, the dependencies present in the world, is in its wholeness immediate — a datum, underived from anything external to itself. In this sense, then, we are not arguing that the Absolute must will, but only that it does will. For it is, and its being includes Will.
In general, it is characteristic of the idealistic point of view, first, that you are able to say of any finite fragment of experience, that, in order to be fact, it must stand in a certain more or less definable relation ​to other finite facts; and, secondly, that, in consequence of the presence of such mediation and relationship amongst the finite facts, the reality, as the Absolute sees it, simply has a definable but immediately actual constitution. In other words, the must of our mediate reasoning holds primarily of the finite in its relation to other finites, and not, except indirectly, of the Absolute itself. “Since the finite must be related thus or thus to other finites in order to be a part of the real, therefore, as we must conceive, the Absolute has a given constitution”: such is our reasoning. Now our must, in such reasoning, expresses precisely the finite point of view, not the absolute point of view, as such. Our must defines primarily the relation of our finite experience to other finite facts, as for instance to that “experience other than ours” to which we appealed in our former discussion. We apply, indeed, formally, our must to the Absolute, in so far as the Absolute is viewed as the object of our conception; that is, precisely, not yet as the Absolute for itself, but as the Absolute defined from our finite point of view. But the Absolute finds fact in its wholeness, where we find only mediation, or where we appeal from our experience to “experience other than ours,” and so see necessity and not immediacy. Therefore, it is indeed true that every conception of the Absolute is, when you take it barely as thought, inadequate to its object. What we say is: “The whole of experience has precisely the sort of unity that any moment of our own conscious life inadequately presents to us.” But such unity is the unity of fact, not of our must, not of any ​mediately conceived necessity. Precisely because we mean the Absolute Whole to be above mere mediation, we in our finite thoughts have to use expressions of mediation which involve, and in fact explicitly state on occasion, their own insufficiency, their inadequacy to their objects. Still otherwise put, our whole argument for the Absolute implies that just because every thought of an object involves a beyond, as well as its own inclusion in the unity of the experience which embodies the beyond, therefore every thought is a moment in a world of fact which, in its wholeness, transcends mere thinking. Or, again, thought in itself is a mere abstraction from and yet in the whole of experience. But all this means that there must be, above every must, that which includes, indeed, the necessity expressed by the must, but transcends such necessity. There must be what is beyond every must. The must is our comment. The is expresses the ultimate fact.
Wrong therefore, in so far, was that older metaphysics which defined God as the “absolutely necessary being.” Fact includes necessity, since necessity in its very relative and finite forms is part of the world of fact. But fact in its wholeness is above necessity, and the last word about the world would be, not “it must be,” but “it is.” Now the older definition for the Absolute Will, as the “cause of the world,” generally ended by making this cause, or Will, at once external to the world of facts which it produced, and, by itself, such as to have a necessary constitution; as, for instance, a necessary efficaciousness, frequently called Omnipotence. Our own theory ​depends, on the contrary, upon recognising fact as supreme, and merely asking: What constitution of fact in its wholeness has to be asserted if you are to avoid contradictions?
The basis of our whole theory is the bare brute fact of experience which you have always with you, namely, the fact: Something is real. Our question is: What is this reality? or, again, What is the ultimately real? As we saw in our earlier section, scepticism tries to reply: “The contents of this experience, as present contents, are alone real.” We found this reply self-contradictory. Why? Because the question, “What is here real?” inevitably involves ideas that transcend the present data. Hereupon our half-idealist asserted: “Real beyond the present are possibilities of experience.” But hereupon the half-idealist fell prey to the realist, who pointed out that, just in so far as the possible experiences transcended the data, they were ipso facto his transcendent “things in themselves,” wholly beyond experience. The realist, however, could himself give no consistent account of these facts as “things in themselves,” because his conception of transcendence was itself a mere abstraction. The only way of consistently defining the situation proved to be the assertion: “The ultimate reality is here, as everywhere, the whole of experience, viewed as Whole.”
This Whole, as such, now proves to have a definable constitution. For it is, first, that to which every finite thought refers in so far as, rightly or wrongly, in truth or in error, it raises any question as to the reality implied in any experience, however ​fragmentary. The Whole of Reality is, as such, the “Same Object,” whoever in the finite world thinks of it, or, for that matter, of anything. There is no other object but this. This at once implies a certain well-known constitution, both for the finite world of thought in its relation to objects and for the world of experience viewed in its character as a whole of immediate fact. This constitution, expressed in terms of pure thought, is defined by the thesis that all possible ideas, since they refer, consciously or unconsciously, to the same object, form a System, and a single system; and that the Absolute, in so far as it is Absolute Thought, has this system of ideas present to it. In other words, all possible thoughts, taken together, form what the mathematicians call a single Group. The concept of the Group, in modern mathematics, precisely corresponds, in particular instances, to the idealist’s conception of the Total System of possible thoughts. A Group is a system of ideal objects such that, by a definite constructive process, you can proceed from any member of the Group to any other, while this process, if exhaustively carried out, defines all possible objects that fall within the Group. Thus the members of the Group form, as it were, an ideal body; as, for instance, in case of the numbers, a definite Group of them, defined by a given constructive process of the nature indicated, would be called a Zahlkörper, or Body of Numbers, in the terminology of certain mathematicians. Well, just so, for the idealist, all the logically possible ideas form such a Group, a system of interrelated members, all referring to the one Ultimate Object, viz., the Whole of ​Experience, and exhaustively definable, in all their relations, by one constructive process, which, if you knew it, would enable you from any one to construct all the rest. It is to such a system, and to its interrelationships, that the conception of “necessity” primarily applies. Plato first conceived of such a system of ideally definable contents, although his Ideas are not identical with those of the modern idealist. Hegel’s Logic was an effort to define just such an absolute Group of ideas, a closed circle of categories, although the effort indeed was imperfect enough. The idealist's thesis is that such an absolute Group is definable, and, from the absolute point of view, is defined.
On the other hand, our thesis maintains that the Absolute Experience, viewed in its wholeness, fulfils this System, or Group, of ideas. This fulfilment, as we have said, is for the Absolute immediate fact. We define this fact, to be sure, in terms of our necessity. Our necessity means merely that we must be consistent, else we shall have asserted nothing. But the whole experience of the Absolute, in its wholeness, is above that necessity. And our proof, once more, goes back to that brute finite experience: “Something is real.” Yet, to use once more the inevitable formula of our finite thinking, we must assert that the Absolute Experience has such constitution as is implied in its fulfilment of the system of ideas. Hence the Absolute Experience, so we assert, is no chaos. Since perfection, worth, significance, fulness of life, organisation, are ideas, the Absolute Experience must present, that is, must be asserted by us as presenting, or, viewed in itself, simply ​does present, an organised, significant, purposeful or teleological, worthy, perfect whole of fact; and that, however much of ill, or imperfection, the finite world seems to contain when fragmentarily viewed. So far, we define, then, the Absolute Thought and Experience in their organic relationships, as, on the one hand, we must assert them to be, and, on the other hand, as, according to our thesis, they themselves are. Of the two, the Experience names the factor which at once, when viewed as whole, includes the thought-aspect of the world, while, so long as you view the thought-aspect abstractly, the Experience appears precisely as the aspect whereby the Thought gets fulfilled. The best expression, so far, might be: “The Absolute experiences that its system of Thought is fulfilled in and through the constitution of the data of its Experience,” — an assertion which makes explicit the self-conscious moment in our whole theory of the Absolute.
But if into this conception of the Absolute the new moment which we have called the Will is to be introduced, there must be some motive present to our thought besides the motives involved in our first deduction of the Absolute. The new motive has been furnished in the foregoing account by a very simple reflection upon what the Absolute, as defined, not merely must be, but, for our definition, and for itself, also immediately is. As defined, it is not merely perfect, significant, and the rest, but it is a Whole; its contents form one Moment. Its unity is the unity of a single Instant. It is that which, as such, neither requires nor permits a beyond. ​
Yet neither as barely abstract thought nor as mere contents of experience is the Absolute yet definable as a positive Whole. On the contrary, although the ideas form a Group, there is nothing as yet about the nature of this Group, when abstractly viewed, which defines, so far, how often, or in what cases, it shall find realisation or fulfilment. On the other hand, the contents of experience, in so far as they are immediate data, simply serve to present the fulfilment of the system of ideas, and not to limit their fulfilment to a single case. In other words, one may so far declare, if one prefers, that there is one Idea which ipso facto does not belong to the original Group of ideas, as abstractly defined; namely, the very Idea of the wholeness of the system of experience in which that Group is to find its fulfilment. Once more, then, an antinomy has presented itself. The Absolute Experience, on the one hand, is that system in which the Group of ideas is realised, and, as absolute experience, forms one Whole. On the other hand, as mere fulfilment of ideas in contents, it is not yet a Whole at all, since other fulfilments so far appear as abstractly possible. The solution of the antinomy must lie in the incompleteness of our account as thus far rendered; namely, of the account in terms of mere thought and mere immediacy of contents. A new element must be added — not that, from the absolute point of view, the new element is an element that embodies an objective necessity, but that, from the absolute point of view, the whole world of facts actually has another aspect, a third aspect, in addition to the immediacy of the ​data and the completeness of the system of ideas. This new aspect may be defined as an aspect of Arrest, of fulfilment by free limitation. That fulfilment could not otherwise be obtained, is our comment. The fact is, that fulfilment is thus attained, namely, by what we have to express as the choice, or attentive selection, of the present world of fact from the indefinite (or infinite) series of abstractly possible worlds, which, by virtue of this choice, are not actually possible. We cannot express this situation better than by saying: “The world forms a Whole because it is as if the Absolute said (or, in our former terms, attentively observed) that, since the absolute system of ideas is once fulfilled in this world, ‘There shall be no world but this,’ i.e. no other case of fulfilment; and therefore other abstractly possible fulfilments remain not genuinely possible.” It is this aspect of the ultimate situation which defines the world as a Whole, and which, without introducing an external cause, or a mere force, does as it were colour the whole unity of the Absolute Consciousness with a new character, namely, the character of Will. As psychology already knows, the will, even in us, is no third “power of the mind.” It is an aspect of our consciousness, pervading every fact thereof, while especially connected with and embodied in certain of the facts of our inner lives. Just so we now say, not: “The Absolute first thinks, then experiences, then wills in such wise as to fashion its experience.” We rather say: “The unity of the Absolute Consciousness involves immediate data, fulfilment of ideas in these data, consciousness of the adequacy ​of this fulfilment, and Will, whereby not merely this adequacy is secured in general, but also the adequacy is concretely secured in one whole and single content of the total experience.”
One might again illustrate our conception by supposing any one of us to ask himself: “What would be my state were my conscious aims to be completely fulfilled, and, above all, were my knowledge to become absolute?” The natural answer would be: “In that case, (1) my thoughts would form one whole system, with no uncomprehended ideas beyond the system. The contents or data of my experience would then (2) fulfil these ideas, so that there would be no object that I thought of without possessing it as present, — for instance, no wish ungratified, no ideal unfulfilled. But hereupon a difficulty would arise. For I should still be able, however many objects of experience exemplified my ideas, to think always of other logically possible fulfilments of any or of all once defined ideas. For such abstract limitlessness is of the essential, the logically necessary, nature of bare thought as such. However much experience gave me, I could think of more, since that would be the very nature of my thinking process. How, then, would the supposed Wholeness of experience be logically possible? To this difficulty I should rightly answer, that an incompleteness for which, not the poverty of my experience, but the abstract endlessness of my demand as thinker was responsible, could readily be supposed to cease if I added one element more to my experience, or at all events to the type of consciousness which I now possessed. This new element would be added when​ever I said that, my ideas being fulfilled in their essence by one case, I should gain no essential benefit, I should add no whit to the genuine perfection of my experience, by passing to new cases. If I now, by some deliberate act of attention, arrested myself, or found myself arrested, in this one act of conscious fulfilment of my system of ideas, I should be perfect as a knower and as a possessor, in a sense in which I should not be perfect if I continued to seek, in hopeless repetitions, for truth that lay always beyond. For such search would involve either an ignorance on my part that nothing novel was thus obtained, or a blind fate that drove me helplessly further. The ignorance I should escape, on the hypothesis that I knew my situation. The blind fate I should escape, if my ideals were all fulfilled. The fulfilment of the ideal of escaping from the blind fate would however involve precisely the presence in me of the will to arrest myself, or to be arrested, at this one world as a single whole of experience. In other words, the perfection of my consciousness, in the supposed case, would involve the element called my will. And my will would mean an attentive dwelling upon this world to the exclusion of the barely possible worlds, which would remain unreal for me merely because my attention left them unreal.
In a variety of terms there is, in such a case as the present, where one has gradually to eliminate various accidental associations, a certain advantage. We may, then, venture on still another name for the present aspect of the Absolute Consciousness. The theology of the past has frequently dealt with the ​attribute called the Divine Love, which it has opposed, on occasion, to the Divine Wisdom. Now just as Will may be generalised as the process, or aspect, of selective attention in consciousness, so Love also may be generalised as an affection or colouring of consciousness which involves a selection of some content as valuable for reasons which can no longer be abstractly defined in terms of this content, or in terms of its mere contrast to the contents to which it is preferred, be these contents actual or possible. A beloved object, as such, is experienced as a datum, is known as embodying ideas, but is preferred by virtue of characters that remain, despite all knowledge, undefined and, in some respects, undefinable. What is clear, to the loving consciousness, is that no other object fills just the place, or could fill just the place, occupied by the beloved object. Now, in viewing the world as the object of the love of an absolute being, one supposes the Absolute Consciousness to contain a moment or aspect that conforms to and exemplifies this generalised definition of Love. This world has a value from the absolute point of view such as no other world, conceived as an abstract possibility, would have. And while this value is, up to a certain point, explained and defined by the fact that the world fulfils these and these specific ideals, one aspect of the matter remains always unexplained, namely, why some other world, with a different sequence of data, might not fulfil, just as well, the same ideas. The selection of this world as the one fulfilment of absolute ideas and ideals would involve, then, an unexplained element. This element is precisely the ​one that might be expressed as the actual Divine Love for this world. The same character has been defined by the term “Will” in the foregoing discussion. The presence of such a character, its value as the very element whereby the Absolute Experience attains wholeness and complete self-possession, and its further character as an element irreducible to the terms of mere thought and mere content of experience, — all these features may now well be suggested by calling this the Divine Love.
But, in the foregoing, one consideration has been introduced that has remained, as yet, undeveloped. I refer to what has been said concerning the relation of Will to Individuality. I have said that the object of Will is, as such, an individuated object. How much is implied in this consideration, cannot be understood until we have undertaken the extremely difficult task of examining the fundamental nature of the category of Individuality. To this I now proceed, in the Third Part of the present paper. ​
PART III THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUATION
The question: What is an individual? and the related question: What principle is the source of Individuation, or of the presence and variety of individuals in the world, or in our knowledge? — these are matters of no small importance for logic, for psychology, and for metaphysics. All these three doctrines have to do with individuals, as possible objects of thought, as well as with those other logical objects called universals. The psychologist has to ask the question: How do we come by the knowledge of the individual objects? — whether primarily or by some secondary process, and whether solely through experience or by virtue of some reflective or intuitive insight. The metaphysician is above all concerned with the questions: What sort of individuals does the real world contain? and, How are they distinguished from one another and from the other types of reality which the universe contains, if there are such other types? The present division of this paper has something to say of all three aspects of our problem; and, as a fact, all three aspects are obviously closely related to one another.
I DEFINITION OF THE PROBLEM
As to the general interest of the problem, even outside of technical philosophy, there can be no ​doubt. When one reflects upon the social and ethical problems which have gathered about the word “individualism,” one is reminded that, after all, men bleed and die in this world for the sake of logic as well as for the sake of home and bread, and that the problems of the study are also the problems of human destiny. If one turns from practical life to the questions of theory, one is reminded that, in theology, God is conceived as an individual, and that each man is an individual, and that Christianity has always involved assertions about the individual as such. In natural science, moreover, a vast collection of problems, especially of biological problems, centre about the definition and the constitution of the individuals of the living world. One cannot hesitate, then, as to the significance of our question. It surely deserves a close study.
Strangely enough, however, this problem has been, in its general philosophical aspects, somewhat neglected, especially in the history of modern philosophy. Leibnitz is almost the only modern thinker who has given it a place correspondent to its dignity. The logical, psychological, and metaphysical problems of universality, of law and of truth and knowledge in their more universal aspects, have otherwise received a much more detailed study than has been given to the correlative problems of individuality. In part, however, this very neglect has been meant as a sort of indirect tribute to the significance of the individual. Individuality has been so little subjected to critical scrutiny, because the existence and importance of the individual have been tacitly assumed as ​obvious. When every logic text-book discusses the theory of the general concept, and easily passes by, with a mere mention, the knowledge of the individual, this is because your knowledge of the individual is supposed to be something relatively so clear and familiar to you that the logician need analyse hardly at all what you mean by that knowledge. “Does not everybody know? Why, you yourself are an individual!” It is of the universal that the logician must speak, because that seems to be something artificial, abstract, an invention of language and of science. Any man of sense has only to open his eyes, or to observe himself within, to appreciate how all original knowledge is of the concrete, the definite, the individual. This, I say, is what the traditional method in logic seems to imply. One fails to comment lengthily upon our knowledge of the individual, because that knowledge is felt to be somehow primary, common, and of central significance in daily life. Just so, too, when in metaphysics one deals with the universal principles, with Reality, with Finite and Infinite, with Law and with Cause, with Knowledge and Illusion, one does all this feeling that it is the concrete world of individuality that is to be explained, to be justified, or to be saved by the truth. One says little about individuality, as such, because one presupposes it.
Yet philosophical neglect is always a misfortune. We can never comprehend until we have learned to reflect; and to presuppose individuals is not to reflect upon what one means by them. So soon as the questions are put: What is an individual? and, ​What is the principle that individuates the world? we are fain to conceal our uncertainty behind a mere repetition of the assertion that individuals are facts.
I cannot but think that the bare assertion of the actuality of individuals, without a prior and general consideration of the whole problem of the category of Individuality, is responsible for much of the difference that appears to exist between Professor Howison’s Ethical Individualism and the Idealistic Monism which he combats. The antinomy referred to at the outset of the present paper has appeared thus far as an antinomy between the claims of theory and the presuppositions of ethics. The theoretical need can only be met by the world where all facts are present in the unity of the Absolute Consciousness. To this Professor Howison replies, that the dignity of the ethical individual demands the real variety and separate existence of the citizens of the “City of God.” But the citizens of this City, if they exist, are not merely ethical but logical individuals, and the question, What is an individual? applies to them as well as to the humblest conceivable individual object. Suppose the answer to this question should involve the perfectly universal assertion, that on the one hand the theoretical view itself, in order to attain its completion in the apprehension of the universe as one Whole, is obliged to make use of the category of Individuality. Suppose that it should then appear that this category is essentially indefinable in purely theoretical terms, — that, in other words, as we have already said, the presence of individuality is essentially an expression of the divine Will. Then at ​once it would appear that the very claims of theory involve giving the world a practically significant aspect. Suppose that it should then further appear that the category of Individuality, as already indicated, demands and secures differentiation of individuals within the unity of the whole consciousness which we have defined as the Absolute. It might well prove, that, since by hypothesis the individuals would then exist not merely as brute facts but as differentiated expressions and cases of significant Will, their significant separation as ethical beings would not, when it existed, involve their mutual isolation as brute facts. In that case all the variety, all the individuation, all the mutual independence that ethical theory demanded might be perfectly consistent with, and even essentially implied by, that very unity of consciousness in which and by virtue of which the individuals were real. Thus the solution of the antinomy might appear by virtue of the definition of the category of Individuality.
On the other hand, this definition could not well be attempted without a consideration of very general logical problems. We should be able to discuss the ethical individual, only when we had first considered the logical individual of any grade, as he appears in ordinary regions of knowledge. Our present discussion will therefore, for the time, lay aside our idealistic presuppositions, take the world of thought as we ordinarily find it, and treat of Individuality as if it were a category of no ethical significance. This method we shall pursue until the discussion of itself leads us back to the point where the meaning of our ​category dawns upon us. In other words, whereas, in the preceding Part of this paper, we discussed the category of Will until we were led to say that the Will individuates, so now we shall discuss the meaning of Individuality until we are led to the assertion that individuation implies Will, but Will in precisely the sense in which our theoretical study of the unity of the world led us to the assumption of that category. Thus the circle being completed, the harmony of theoretical and ethical considerations may be in general rendered explicable; and we shall then be prepared to proceed, in the Fourth Part of our paper, directly to the discussion of the Self-conscious Individual.
As said above, the customary way of dealing with the individual in logic has been to assume that the individual is the beginning of knowledge. But it is useless thus to try to escape from an essential difficulty by becoming dogmatic, and by declaring that individuals are the immediately known realities with which science begins. For in fact, on the contrary, the far-off goal of science is the knowledge of the individual. We do not really begin our science with the individual. We hope and strive some day to get into the presence of the individual truth. All universality is, in one sense, a mere scaffolding and means to this end. That this is true is precisely what this discussion will undertake to indicate before I am done. ​
II THE THOMISTIC THEORY OF INDIVIDUATION
Our problem, then, has been too much neglected. Yet it has indeed had a history. Although Plato considered the matter, Aristotle was the first philosopher who possessed the technical means for fully defining the problem, in all its main aspects, — logical, psychological, and metaphysical. He did define it, — and left it unsolved. The schoolmen, long afterwards, resumed the unfinished task. As the preclassical period of scholasticism was especially busied with the problem of the universal, so the classical and postclassical periods of scholasticism gave great attention to the problem of the individual. Controversy existed, both as to the interpretation of Aristotle’s authority, and as to the independent treatment of those elements of the question which Aristotle had left undecided. In theology, the problem of the Trinity, the problem of the individuality of the “active intelligence” in man, and of the individuality of the human soul itself, in view of its possession of the “active intelligence,” and, finally, the problems of angelology, gave special significance to these scholastic discussions of the Principle of Individuation.
St. Thomas, one of the two principal scholastic students of our problem, decided that form as such, in the Aristotelian sense, is “not to be communicated to various individuals unless by the aid of matter.” This holds, at all events, for the entire created world. In consequence, matter, and in particular ​what Thomas called materia signata, i.e. designated matter, matter quantitatively determined, or limited by particular spatial dimensions and boundaries, is, in corporeal substances, the principle of individuation. On the other hand, it is not at all true, as it is sometimes asserted, that, for St. Thomas, matter is the sole principle of individuation in all grades of being. The Thomistic doctrine of the individual, viewed in its wholeness, seems to run much as follows:
An individual (Summa Theol., P. 1, Q. XXX, Art. IV) possesses a certain characteristic modus existendi, in so far as an individual is something “per se subsistens distinctum ab aliis.” Individuals are also to be called, according to the well-known tradition, “first substances” or “hypostases” (Id., Q. XXIX, Art. I). The name “hypostasis,” however, is more properly applied to the rational individual, the person, or to beings “who have dominion over their acts,” or who act per se. The fact of such self-determination gives a peculiar dignity to their individuality; and individuals of this grade are properly called persons, or “hypostases in the proper sense.” Every person is an individual, since actions are “in singularibus” (loc. cit.). On the other hand, not every individual is a person.
If one speaks of the rational individuals, or persons, one observes, then, that their individuality need not be dependent, in any sense, upon material conditions. Thus, according to Thomas (Q. III, Art. 11), a form such as that of God, self-subsistent and not “receivable in matter,” is individuated by the very ​fact that it “cannot be received in another.” Thus, too, the persons of the Trinity are, for Thomas, individuals. “The word ‘individual,’” says Thomas, in another passage, “cannot belong to God in so far forth as matter is the principle of individuation, but only in so far as the word ‘individual’ implies incommunicability” (Q. XXIX, Art. III). In this sense (Q. XXIX, Art. IV), an individual is something indistinctum, or unseparated within itself, but ab aliis distinctum, that is, set apart, by reason of its subsistence, from other individuals. The principle of individuation in case of the Trinity is the unique character of the relatio which distinguishes, for Thomas, the three persons. In God, each person is a relatio subsistens, that is, not merely an abstract relation as such, dependent upon its terms, but an individual and concrete term that subsists or is distinguished solely by its relational function. “As Deitas or Godhead is God, so the divine Paternity is God the Father.” A divine person, or person of the Trinity, signifies therefore a relation as subsistent. Thus Thomas states the case in the Summa (Q. XXIX, Art. IV): “In the comprehension of the individual substance, that is, of the distinct or incommunicable substance, one understands, in the Divine, a relation.” So far, then, one has distinction of “subsistent relations” as the principle of individuation within God. But this case is unique. Nowhere else is relation, as such, the principle of individuation.
Amongst the created rational beings, the problem of individuality becomes important in two cases. ​Coming downwards from God, the first case is that of the angels. They (Q. L, Art. II) are not “composites of matter and form.” “It is impossible,” says Thomas, “that a substantia intellectualis (such as is an angel) should have any kind of matter whatever.” The angels are therefore, according to the famous Thomistic doctrine, primarily individuated by their species, i.e. by their forms, since they too are (in so far like God) formæ subsistentes. “It is impossible that there should be two angels of one species, as it is impossible to say that there are several separated whitenesses, or several humanities” (Q. L, Art. IV). One must add, of course, that the individual angel is no mere abstraction, like whiteness or humanity, but has those other characters of the rational individual before enumerated. Within himself, namely, the angel has, as Thomas proceeds to expound, his self-consciousness, his freedom of will (a freedom now, to be sure, confirmed forever to good or to ill), and his measure of knowledge of the truth that is both above and below him. In his relation to God, the angel has his individual “mission.” In respect of other angelic individuals, the angel has his incommunicable and specific distinctio ab aliis. In all these ways his individuality is marked off, and herein lies the separate subsistence of his form.
If one passes to the case of the human soul, one meets with a new problem. The Thomistic doctrine of the soul was notoriously a subtle and complex one — a development of Aristotle’s doctrine, in a somewhat difficult sense. The soul itself is not a composite of form and matter. It is immaterial. Yet its ​function is, to be the form of the human body; and this it is, even in its intellectual operations. All human souls are of the same species. But we learned in case of the angels that immaterial substances can have no individuation within any one species. How then are the immaterial souls of men, intellectual entities as they are, preserved from flowing together into one intellectual soul? The answer is: They are first individuated by the bodies to which they are joined. In Thomas’s words: “Although the intellectual soul has no matter from which it is constituted, just as an angel has none, yet it is form of a certain matter, as an angel is not. And so, according to the division of the matter, there are many souls of one species, whereas there cannot be many angels of one species” (Q. LXXVI, Art. II).
Hereupon, however, one would suppose that this diversity of the souls of the one human species would cease with their separation from the body. This, of course, Thomas denies. His reason is, that since the soul is, secundum suum esse, or naturally, joined to a body, and since the multiplicity of any type of entities depends upon their esse, the accident of the separation of soul and body between death and judgment cannot destroy the essential individuality of the separated souls. An inclinatio to an individuated body exists in the separated soul, and individuates the latter. In sum, then, the human individual is such, first of all, by the fact that his soul is naturally the form of this individual body, and Socrates, for instance, is defined, in this aspect, as the being who possesses “this flesh and these bones.” On the other hand, in ​the composite called man, the body exists for the sake of the soul, and not vice versa. The being thus primarily individuated exists in order that his intellect may attain self-possession, a knowledge of the truth, and the right ultimate relation to God. But in the ideal condition of ultimate perfection thus defined, the intellectual individual, whose character as this man has its material basis in the body, attains, as his completed individuality, to an exercise of free will and of reason which will assimilate him to the angels. Separated from the body at death, the soul will be reunited thereto at the end; and the completed individual in his final state will be subsistent both materially and formally, — through matter, yet not merely as matter.
If we finally pass to the world of the individuals below the human level, namely, to animals and to inanimate objects, we reach the realm where matter, as the true principle of individuation, becomes at last paramount. To be sure, even here, matter of itself causes no individuality, since form is everywhere the final cause, and since every individual is a composite of form and matter, in which the matter exists for the sake of the form. Only matter, as the materia signata, or matter of “determinate dimensions,” is the conditio sine qua non of individuation. The fact that whiteness, cold, crystallisation, etc., as these accidents, here inform the particular materia signata whose substantial form is water, and whose place is in yonder cloud, — this gives you, as result, this individual snow-flake. To be sure, there are many hints, in Thomas, that the sensuous, immediate, and, in so far, appar​ently unideal or unintelligible basis of individuation which seems to be implied in this account is not any absolute, but only a humanly distorted truth. One’s first impression of the doctrine is, indeed, that it makes the individual a mere brute fact of sense, and in so far incomprehensible. For the materia signata of the Thomistic account is not mere matter in the strict Aristotelian sense, viz., matter as mere potentia. On the contrary, the materia signata is sensuous matter, the brute fact of the world of perception; and the meaning of the doctrine seems, in so far, to be that corporeal individuals are essentially sensuous and immediate, and not intellectually intelligible beings, just in so far forth as they are corporeal individuals. The intellect knows universals; the senses show us individuals; and, so far, the old Aristotelian difficulty returns, but, on the other hand, this is not the end. The same Thomas who makes the corporeal individual thus wholly indefinable for our intellect, by reason of its sensuous materiality, also asserts that not only God (Q. XIV, Art. II), but also the angels (Q. LVII, Art. II), must know corporeal individuals. But the angels know truth in purely intellectual, not in sensuous forms. “By one intellectual virtue,” declares Thomas, “the angels know both universal and immaterial, singular and corporeal objects.” If this be true, then the material opaqueness, the sensuous and indefinable immediacy, of the corporeal individual, as we view it, must to an angelic intelligence possess the same sort of clearness and of ideal and definable intelligibility that is possessed, for us, by universal principles. Our opaque material individual of the ​world of sense cannot, then, be the individual as God and the angels know individuality.
So much for St. Thomas’s doctrine of Individuation. It sums itself up in the assertion, that, whereas the higher forms of conscious and rational individuality are definable in various and relatively intelligible, although still more or less empirical terms, corporeal individuals are, for us, although not for God, nor for the angels, nor in themselves, undefinable and ultimate facts, known to us only in so far as a communicable form gets embodied in one spatially determined and sensuously observable matter, so that the resulting composite nature is “singular and incommunicable.”
There can be little doubt that this doctrine of individuality is at once skilful and vulnerable. It formed a favourite object for attack in later scholastic discussion. Most noteworthy is the doctrine that Duns Scotus opposed to Thomas concerning this topic. Duns Scotus is the second of the two principal scholastic students of our problem.
III THE SCOTISTIC THEORY OF INDIVIDUATION
The chief discussion of individuality in Duns Scotus occurs in the Angelology of the second part of the Subtle Doctor’s commentary upon the Sententiæ, in the first half of the sixth volume of his works. Duns Scotus employs, throughout, a widely known and, so far, purely formal definition of indi​viduality. By an individual, as an object of knowledge, one means something opposed to a universal. Now by a universal, as man, one means an object of thought that one can conceive as logically “divided” into “various parts of which it can be predicated.” Thus, man is divisible into the European and non-European classes of men. But of both classes, man itself can be predicated. On the other hand, by an individual, one means an object of knowledge that “cannot be divided into parts of which it can be predicated,” or, in the terminology of Scotus, that “cannot be divided into partes subjectivas.” Thus, the leg or the eye of Socrates is not Socrates, and Socrates cannot be divided into parts of which Socrates can be predicated. Or, again, there cannot be two men, each of whom has the nature of Socrates. Herein Socrates the individual differs from man. A snow-flake, or other corporeal thing, is an individual precisely in so far as one says: “It is this, and such a this that you cannot predicate it, the whole, of any of its parts, or of any two representative cases.” Not otherwise, however, for Duns Scotus, could the individuality even of the angels be logically defined. But such a formal definition is a mere introduction to the general problem.
Duns Scotus examines, at great length, not only Thomas’s theory, but also other theories of the metaphysical principle that can give individuals this character of logical indivisibility. This principle, he reasons, cannot be in any sense a mere negation. This stone is not an individual merely because it is not that stone, but rather because there is “something ​positive, intrinsic to this stone,” which forbids the stone “to be divided into partes subjectivas” (Duns Scotus, Opera, Vol. VI, p. 375). On the other hand, material substance, by the mere fact of its existence as such, is neither explained as an individual, nor shown to be the source of individuality in anything else. For, first: Existence, as such, is no determined predicate of anything, and so cannot individuate what is otherwise undetermined (Id., p. 379). In other words, individuation, if it is a truth, is a somewhat, needing to be defined. If you have not already defined, apart from the fact of existence, what makes Socrates and the stone, viewed in their nature or essence, individuals, you cannot make the individuality clearer by merely saying, Socrates (or The stone) exists. Moreover, the question would then arise about existence, as before about essence: What is the nature of individual existence? The concept of existence is not identical with the concept of individuality. Individuality is, then, a something pertaining to the nature of the individual object, and is not a result of the mere existence of the individual. You can say, indeed: “All that actually exists is individual.” But you do not thus explain what individuality is. God knew individuals, as pure ideas, before the creation. This Thomas himself asserts. These individuals must, then, have possessed an individual essence in advance of their existence.
Moreover, the Thomistic doctrine of the corporeal individual, as individuated by reason of the quantitatively determined matter that enters into its composition, must be false; for the individual can persist, ​although its corporeal dimensions change; while, on the other hand, when the corporeal individual is corrupted, the same quantitatively determined matter remains, but the individual is lost. Furthermore, quantitative distinctions in the material world, i.e. distinctions of position, shape, and the like, are all of them primarily known to us in universal form, — not as individual but as specific characters of the object that we have before us. Quantity is no more and no less individuated for our reason than is any other object of thought. This place, this shape, this size, and this definite matter, are just as hard to define in an individual way as this angelic nature, or this immaterial soul.
In consequence of these and many other considerations, Scotus considers himself warranted in substituting for the Thomistic theory of the individual another statement, namely, first, that, wherever an individual exists, there exists, as the background of the individual, a certain common nature (e.g. man exists as the background of Socrates), and this common nature has indeed its unity, but a unity “less than the numeral unity” of the individual. Secondly, the doctrine asserts that, added to this unity, in case of the individual, there is another, and, as Scotus strongly insists, a “positive entitas,” or “individual nature,” which per se determines the common nature to singularity. This positive entitas, or, as the Scotists later always called it, the hæcceitas (although it is not certain that Scotus himself, in his authentic writings, uses this latter technical term), “makes one with” the common nature, or, in the individual, is ​organically “fused” with the common nature (op. cit., p. 403). “As unity in common,” says Scotus (op. cit., p. 406), “per se accompanies entity in common, so some sort of unity accompanies per se every entity; therefore, unity simpliciter (and such is the unity of the individual, often hereinbefore described, namely, the unity which forbids division into many partes subjectivas, and which forbids that the individual should fail to be this designated object) — unity simpliciter, in case such unity exists in beings, as all opinion supposes, accompanies per se some entity. But this unity does not accompany per se the entity of the common nature, for the latter” (e.g. the nature of man) “has its own special sort of real unity — and so the unity of the individual” (e.g. of Socrates) “accompanies some other entity determined as that.” Thus the entity of the individual appears as something essentially intelligible, and in no sense either accidental or material. This individuality of Socrates belongs to the idea of Socrates as an idea, in advance of the existence of Socrates; and remains with Socrates even when this materia signata of his flesh and bones wholly changes.
An objection to this view of the intelligible hæcceitas appears, of course, in the well-known fact of the actual indefinability of the individual — a fact often cited, upon Aristotle’s authority, by the schoolmen. To this objection Scotus replies (p. 414): “The singular is per se intelligible, in so far as it exists ex parte sua,” i.e. in so far as itself is concerned. “But, if it is not per se intelligible to a particular intellect, such as ours, the impossibility is once for all ​not from the side of the singular, which is per se intelligible; just as it is not the sun’s fault if it is invisible, but the fault of one’s vision in the night, or of one’s eyes.” In consequence (op. cit., p. 491), there is no reason why the angels may not know the individual, because it is essentially intelligible. Just so, too, there is no reason why there should not be as many individual angels of the same species as God is pleased to create.
IV CRITICAL COMPARISON OF THE THOMISTIC AND SCOTISTIC THEORIES
Possibly these scholastic subtleties may appear ineffective and wearisome; yet to me, I confess, they constitute an almost indispensable introduction to the study of our problem. The scholastic angelology always furnishes an admirable means for the definition of the nature of finite rational individuality as such, by reason of the ease with which this doctrine of the angels can hypothetically abstract from the empirical conditions of our human life. So that a modern student of philosophy may well envy the scholastics their angels. A metaphysician needs illustrations, and the angel is a peculiarly neat and charming sort of illustration. For the rest, the doctrines of Duns Scotus and Thomas are as instructive by reason of their essential agreement as to the main problem, as by reason of their really non-essential differences. The doctrines show one where the ​nerve of the problem lies. The very naïveté of that Aristotelian theory of knowledge which the scholastics agree in employing, helps to render simpler the statement of the issue. Let us, then, next restate the matter more in our own way, pointing out, as we go, how our two representative scholastics, although differing in terms and in emphasis, really face the same problem, and leave it in much the same obscurity.
There are individuals in the universe. That is a matter of “common opinion,” or in other words, is known to everybody. Moreover, Aristotle says, and our scholastics agree, that our human insight begins through some sort of more or less vague, and even indefinitely universal, knowledge of individual objects. But next comes the question: How do you define, in a purely formal way, the connotation of the term “individual”? Here, at once, two methods of definition appear. One method, that made the more prominent in Thomas, seems dependent directly upon experience, or upon revelation, and tells us what it is that is empirically needed in order that one individual should be regarded as different from other individuals. As a fact, then, the world contains individuals in so far as it contains objects “indistinct,” or undivided within themselves, ab aliis vero distincta. This, as we may remember, is what Thomas says. Thus one first appeals to mere facts. They may be viewed as revealed facts, — as in case of the Trinity or of the angels, — or as facts of self-consciousness, as in case of my own individuality, which I feel to be other than yours; or they may be facts observed ​in the outer world, as when I see that this stone is another object than that stone. In any case, individuals are, so far, facts of direct or of revealed experience. So the world is made; viz., with separated or segmented masses of observable contrast in it. Individuality first means just this observable or immediate discreteness of structure in the universe. One might seek to rest here, and might ask: Where then is the problem? The universe is cut up into segments. That is matter of fact. One can as little tell what such segmentation in general is, as one can tell what colour is. One observes the fact. The ultimate principle at the basis of it all may be known to God, but is not for us to know.
But there is another and a puzzling aspect about this individualisation of the world. Discreteness exists not only in the world of facts, but in the world of ideas, and not only as the discreteness of individuals, but as the discreteness of universals. The numbers are discrete; yet they are not individuals in the sense in which Socrates and Plato are individuals. Good and evil, white and black, colour and sound, cause and effect, motion and rest, are present to our minds as various, as distinguished, as discretely sundered objects of possible knowledge. Yet these are not individuals. Our problem is then unfinished. We need to know, about the individual, not merely what in experience distinguishes one individual from another individual, but what distinguishes the individual, as such, from other objects of knowledge, viz., from the various types of the universal. And here is a reason why Leibnitz’s later and famous doctrine ​of the “identity of indiscernibles,” and of individuation through mere ideal or typical variety, fails to meet all the conditions of our problem.
So a second definition of individuality is needed, and a second method must be tried. When one says: Universals or ideas have no concrete or ultimately real existence, but are artificial products of the process of knowledge, or when one tries to mediate, as the scholastics did, between this view and opposing views, by the famous distinction between the universals ante res (viz., in God’s mind), in rebus (merely as the formal or ideal aspects of reality, — the laws and types present in the natural world), and post res (namely, as the abstractions of the human mind), — in every such doctrine one contrasts the individual and the universal aspects either of reality itself or of our human conception of reality. In any case, whether one is nominalist or conceptualist, or even Platonic realist, one is bound to tell what one means by this contrast between individual existence as such and universality of type as such, — and that, too, no matter how much one insists that the real world contains no universals, but only individuals, and no matter how much, on the contrary, one despises the individuals, and regards the universal aspect of reality as the truth.
One turns, then, to the second method of defining individuals. Individuals are segmented objects of knowledge; but then, as we have just seen, not all segmented objects of knowledge are individuals. How does the individuality of experience differ from the sort of segmentation that exists in the world of ​ideas? And now we come to the more purely logical attempts to give a formal answer to the question: What is the connotation of the term “individual”?
To this question, viewed in this second way, the formal answer accepted by Duns Scotus, and traceable, of course, to Aristotle himself, seems indeed well applicable. A logical universal is capable of logical division into partes subjectivas. A logical individual is an object incapable of such division. This, as a merely formal definition, appears, I repeat, fair enough. In a very recent book, viz., in Schroeder’s admirable Algebra der Logik, in that very interesting chapter of the second volume which is devoted to the formal logic of the individual, a variation of this classic definition appears, in two or three different symbolic forms. The substance of Schroeder’s definition is, that by an individual, in the formal logic of extension, one means (1) a class, or “Gebiet,” different from zero, or from the “Null-Classe,” i.e. from a non-existent class; and then one also means (2) that this existent class is further incapable of being at once partially included within each of any two classes that exclude each other. Thus, if Socrates is an individual, he is conceived as incapable, as long as he exists, of being at once partially within and partially without the class defined as Athenians, or as incapable of being at once partially within each of the mutually exclusive classes, Athenian and Milesian. On the other hand, the class philosopher, which is not a logical individual, can exist as partly Athenian and partly not, or as partly Athenian and ​partly Milesian. So it is that Schroeder states, although in his own more exact and symbolic language, the substance of the classic definition, not of the empirical individual, viewed merely as an object segmented from other objects, but of the logical individual, viewed as something different from a universal object.
Well, let us take this second or formal method of defining what we mean by “individual,” and let us return with it to that world of empirical objects that we left behind us a moment ago, when we resolved to try this second method. We have begun by saying: The empirical world is, as a fact, segmented into discrete masses of contents. There are you and I, there are Socrates and Plato, there are the separate stones and the legions of angels; there, above all, is God. Now, these segmented facts are what we mean by individuals. But our definition was, so far, incomplete. The world of pure ideas is full of segmentation and of contrast; yet good and evil, beauty and ugliness, man in general and angel in general, although segmented, are not individuals. We need further to know, how the individual is contrasted with the universal. Now we get an answer. The logical individual, as contrasted with logical universal, is the object incapable of logical division; incapable, then, as predicate, of being predicated of two subjects; incapable, as subject, of being classified into subordinate classes; incapable, in fine, of being exemplified by, or in, more than one case. In brief: The logical individual is a type or kind of being which, by definition, is incapable of being realised ​in more than one single instance. Or, yet again, the logical individual is the essentially unique being.
But let us put these two aspects of individuality together. For it is admitted, as Thomas throughout implies, that we believe in individuals, either because, as a fact, we experience their presence, or because we conclude their concrete reality by reasoning from our experience, as Thomas does in case of God, or because we get their presence somehow revealed to us indirectly, as, for Thomas, revelation assures us of the Trinity and of the hosts of the angels. On the other hand, it is sure, as Scotus insists, and as Thomas too would admit, that we logically mean the individual to be intelligibly different from the universal, in precisely the abstracter way just defined. But what then? Is not our true problem at last fully before us? We observe or otherwise learn of the concrete and segmented masses of contents in the world of fact. And now — here is the puzzle — we are somehow sure that each of these segmented objects, in respect of just what we call its individuality, is unique in its individual kind, represents a class that can have but one possible representative, or is the sole individual of its own separated sort. Now the real questions are: What do we mean by this assertion? How come we to be so sure of it, and what is the metaphysically real condition of this segmentation of the unique? These are the questions as to the Principle of Individuation.
In Thomas’s answer, the philosopher tries, with characteristic simplicity and kindly fidelity to the facts as he sees them, to reduce, so far as possible, ​the logical uniqueness of the individual to the empirical fact of the separateness of each individual from every other. The result, however, is that the problem really gets no one intelligible answer at all. In the world of sense, one individual, as a matter of fact, is presented as materially — that is, in the end, immediately and inexplicably — different from the other, however much the two may agree in universal type. This flesh, these bones, differentiate Socrates from anybody else. But at once come objections. Is Socrates, as the individual, an intelligible object at all, or is he merely a brute fact of sense? If he is intelligible, then one who knows him, not as a mere man, but as this man, apparently has an idea, i.e. an “intelligible species,” of Socrates as this man. But, in the scholastic theory of knowledge, an idea, or “intelligible species,” is a “form” — in a knower — that is immaterial, and that agrees in type with the type of its object. In other words, an act of knowledge, as I should myself prefer to express it, involves, as such, an imitation of an object in terms of a construction which a knower produces within his own consciousness. But, if this be so, an “imitation,” an “intelligible species,” an “idea” of an object, is, as such, per se universal. One has not to look about in the world of experience to see whether another individual precisely like Socrates ever appears there. If one ever intellectually knows, and not merely sensuously observes, Socrates as this man, then ipso facto the individual type of Socrates has been repeated in the imitative intelligent consciousness of some knower, and this type has no longer a unique exemplification. ​But this cannot be if Socrates is to remain unique as this man. The result, so far, seems to be perfectly obvious. It is as Aristotle said. The individual as such is an immediate object, but not an intelligible object. What result, after all, could be more obvious? Nobody’s knowing of Socrates could be Socrates, or even another case of the same man. Hence, in order to save the reality of the individual, you have to exclude some aspect of him from any possible intelligible knowledge. And this aspect is precisely his individuality as Socrates. This flesh, these bones, — they are matter. You will never get them into pure form.
But, alas! — one’s perplexities have only begun. Socrates, it seems, is, as individual, unique, and therefore never to be made an object of intelligently complete contemplation. Only his type — his humanity, whiteness, etc. — could be imitated by a knower of him. Knowledge is of the common, the universal. Is this the end? No, indeed; for there is One who knows Socrates through and through, and who knew him from eternity, when time was not. That One is God. The Divine ideas are not only of universals, but of individuals. Thomas expressly proves the fact. Moreover, Socrates, even as individual, has a twofold being: in God, as an individual idea eternally present; and out of God, as created being. Are these two cases of the unique Socrates the same? No; Thomas, in one passage, very carefully distinguishes the two, — and curiously enough he distinguishes the created being of things, as their hoc esse, from their ideal being in God, their esse. Yet ​the esse of Socrates in God, before the creation, was as individual as Socrates now is! Here then is Socrates, the unique individual, present twice in the world of being, — as uncreated but known, as created, yet to God also known.
Now, is this difficulty a mere accident of the Thomistic theology? I think not. From any point of view, as we see, the question arises, not merely: Is there the individual Socrates? but: What is the individual Socrates? — how is the idea of him defined? If this question is answerable, then wherever the answer is supposed to be absolutely adequate the esse of Socrates gets, in the world of absolute being, two exemplifications, or else Socrates is no longer an individual in so far as individuality means uniqueness. But if the question is unanswerable, then individuality remains, for God as for men, either an unintelligible brute fact, or something still to be pointed out by philosophy.
Yet, even if this problem of the Divine knowledge, and of the esse of the uncreated Socrates, had been set aside as essentially above our comprehension, the question would recur, for Thomas as for others, in other forms. Socrates is known as this man to at least one angel, viz., his own angelus custodiens, or guardian angel. But angels are intellective beings, who sense no brute facts as mere facts, but know what is for them essentially intelligible. Moreover, Socrates reflectively, if inadequately, knows himself to be nobody but himself. Hence, for self-consciousness, individuality is not a mere brute fact, but means something, — is ideal, formal, universal, and, as Duns ​Scotus well insisted, must certainly mean more than an inclinatio toward this flesh and these bones; or, as we should say, must mean more than mere constancy of “visceral and muscular sensations.” Moreover, there are the angels, who are individuals, and who, for themselves, are through and through intelligible and intelligent. All these problematic facts of the scholastic world are but illustrations of the universal issue which we must all somehow face. I use the scholastic examples only as such illustrations. “De te fabula,” we say to anybody who is disposed to smile at the tangles. “You believe that you know individuals as such. Then just such problems are for you.” Meanwhile, Thomas has to admit that, in itself, if not for us, individuality, as such, must in view of these considerations depend upon some intelligible principle of differentiation, which somehow gets applied to the ideal nature of the universe, and which so, in the end, formally individuates. Scotus, in the last analysis, asserts no more. For Scotus, the hæcceitas is a positive individual character, essentially ideal and intelligible. And yet Thomas is right in his instinct that intelligible individuality, in so far forth as intelligible, seems at once, on the other hand, to involve principles that, as ideal, are universal, and that therefore, when applied, will explain only classes or types of objects, and never uniqueness. Why not another case of this hæcceitas if the hæcceitas is ideal and intelligible?
The special arguments of Scotus now hardly need here further analysis. The real point of the Subtle Doctor, I take it, is that you never can rest content in ​your mind with the empirical individuals of sense and of revelation. For these segmented facts, as they present themselves, are indeed sundered; but they are not yet logical individuals. For the logical individual is not the segmented as such, but the unique as such, — viz., that which is sole in its kind. No empirical character, — not the mere fact of existence, — not immediate material presence, — not even quantitatively determined matter, which is but another name for an intelligible type, — can explain individuality. An individual is such because of its hæcceitas, i.e. because its ideally intelligible nature determines the universal to an essentially unique expression. This is the notion of Scotus; and we saw that the angelic doctor Thomas, who in his beautiful way sees all sides of his subject, but who, with his gentle discretion, always avoids recognising his own inconsistencies, by reason of his instinctively skilful and imperturbable silence to all his most intractable problems, — we saw that he, too, substantially admits as much as Scotus demands, while explicitly making prominent in his mind the empirical aspects of individuality. Of the two thinkers, Thomas, in fact, is the more instructive, just because, as to this matter, he is the more empirical and the more inconsistent. Yet even Scotus is wholly unable to tell us what the hæcceitas is. That he leaves to God and the angels. He only knows what the hæcceitas does. Fusing with universals, it makes individuals. And so, in character, it is comparable to Kant’s “Schema,” since it is an idea when it gets amongst the ideas, but is a this when it is viewed in the world of experience. Like the bat in ​the fable, it scratches with the beasts and flies with the birds, whenever the two parties contend; but, most of all, it loves hiding and the twilight.
V THE INDIVIDUAL AS UNDEFINABLE BY THOUGHT, AND AS UNPRESENTABLE IN EXPERIENCE
Our schoolmen have now admirably defined our problem for us. A study of Leibnitz’s later doctrine would, I think, give us no essentially new light on the subject. We must try our own hands. The empirical world contains various sorts and degrees of segmentation. We call, or may call, any segmented mass an individual, of a lower or of a higher grade. But we mean more than the mere presence of segmentation by the use of the name “individual.” We mean that this one before us is not only segmented, but, in respect of its hæcceitas, unique. The question is, first: How can we be sure of this uniqueness? The first obvious answer is: “Sense, or some other form of brute experience, assures us of the fact.” But to this the equally obvious retort is: “Mere experience, as such, cannot immediately assure us of anything of the kind. Uniqueness is an idea of great subtlety. Individual Identity requires in general careful proof, or, at all events, careful reflection, as in case of our own identity. Moreover, what experience really presents is the fact of segmentation. Logical considerations, it would seem, must then supply the element of uniqueness.” On the other hand, this opposed answer ​seems equally difficult. Experience, let us say, does not prove the asserted uniqueness. Then how can thought prove the uniqueness? Only by identifying the presented and segmented Somewhat with a concept; say, the concept of this man or of Socrates, which is such a concept as to forbid any multiple exemplification. But, now, how could one define an idea so as to forbid the defined nature to have multiple exemplification? To define is to specify, but not to individualise. Define a man of such shape, size, colour, eyes, hair, “finger-prints,” feeling, knowledge, and fortune. You have only defined a type. That this type has but one exemplification, you must leave to experience to prove. So far, then, the antinomy seems complete. Thought, as such, cannot define uniqueness, and must appeal to experience; experience, as such, cannot present uniqueness, but must leave that, as being either an intelligible type or nothing, to thought.
It is customary to avoid noticing this difficulty, because one asserts that experience does come to us wholly individualised into experiences of this moment, this place, and so of this desk, this pen, and the rest. I need not here wearily repeat Hegel’s destructive criticism of the concept of the this, merely as the presented fact of what he called “sense-certainty.” It is enough here to observe that the this of passing experience is often and rightly regarded as an individual content; but it is so regarded because one assumes already a previous knowledge of an individual whole, or of a determinate fact, within which, or in relation to which, the this of the passing experience becomes secondarily ​definable as a full-fledged and then unquestionable individual. For example, if you assume this room as an already known individual, then indeed this observed place in this room gets a perfectly determined individuality, in relation to the rest of the room. Assume that this day as a whole is already known as an individual, and then this moment, timed by my watch, has its place in the day’s wholeness. In general, give me one individual, and I have my ποῦ στῶ, and can know other individuals of the same type to an indefinite extent. Give me, as a supposably fixed point in space, this origin of co-ordinates, and this plane of individually fixed direction, and then I can define, first, all three of my co-ordinate planes, and then the individual position of any point you please in space. But just as I need to assume, as an individual point, my origin of co-ordinates before I can define the place of any other point in space; just as I know not where any here is until you first give me the place of some other here, to which I can relate the first; so, in general, the this of passing experience is a true individual for me only by contagion, so to speak, i.e. in so far as the this catches hold upon individuality through its relation to other presupposed or assumed individuals. In my life, assumed as an individual whole, this experience, in relation to other assumed individual experiences, has its unique place. Nor is it otherwise with any this of experience. The this is not a presented individual, but borrows its individuality from the presupposed individuality of others. To appeal to the this is thus to trade on credit. As we shall later see in this ​paper, even our empirical self-consciousness is no exception to this rule. The self, as the mere empirical this, borrows its individuality from the presupposed social individuality to which it is related. The empirical ego, in its phenomenal presence, is a social contrast-effect. I am this individual, in ordinary life, because of my determinate and conscious relation to other assumed individuals.
But the holder of the doctrine that experience does come to us wholly individuated is accustomed to insist still more elaborately upon space and time as principles of individuation; and fairness demands a little closer examination of this thesis, which nowadays may be said to hold the field in all the customary presentations of the problem of the individual. Accounts such as that of Wundt, in his Logik, — accounts of which very many examples might be found in modern literature, — declare the original of our idea of the individual to be the this in space and time, the here-and-now object. The object, thus individuated in space and time, as this empirically impenetrable thing, whose place cannot now be occupied by another thing, is supposed to be followed thenceforth by our consciousness, and identified by virtue of the continuity of its appearance as it changes its place, or as it is seen again from time to time; and thus, as one supposes, the concept of the individual gets differentiated. The uniqueness of the individual means, from this point of view, simply the experience that no other object can occupy the same place at the same time. Were our experience ideally continuous, we should follow this same object from place to place, and perceive ​that throughout its history it was always such that no other object could occupy its place, whatever that place might be, at the same time with this impenetrable individual. Thus the individual would remain always unique, by virtue of its permanent exclusion of any other from the place occupied by it at any time. Hence the conceived uniqueness of the individual gets defined. It is admitted by Wundt, and by others, that such impenetrability and continuity is only imperfectly observable in our actual experience of things; and this is why, according to Wundt, the conception of the ordinary thing of common-sense gradually gives place, as science progresses, to the conception of ideal things, called substances, whereof molecules, atoms, etc., are examples. But the origin and essential nature of the concept of the individual is supposed to be thus explained.
To this familiar explanation of individuality we must still stubbornly reply, that what it has identified is always a collection of universal types, never an individual. In the visual space before me at any time, I actually see — what? So far, masses of colour. What, from a logical point of view, are these? Answer, universals. Were I confined to visual experience, I should in the long run, and after allowing for the occasional occultation or eclipse of one visible object by another, learn that these same masses of colour are mutually exclusive, so far as concerns the occupation of the same space at any time. But would this knowledge, viewed simply in itself, apart from other facts and motives, be what I now call a knowledge of individual things? Answer, ​No; so far, it would be a knowledge of the repugnance of what I now call certain universal qualities. The meaning of it, technically expressed, would be simply that various colour experiences cannot at the same time acquire the same “local sign.” But the local sign, or complex of local signs, by which in the long run I define any one portion of my visual field, is essentially a universal, a quality; and that this same quality cannot be associated, at the same time, with two different colour experiences, is a fact belonging to the world of universal law, namely, of law relating to the mutual repugnance of qualities. Neither local signs nor colours, as such, are yet individuals. Nor is their union an individual. Nor is the segmentation of the field of colour vision, viewed with or without its local signs, as yet an experience of anything but universals. Nor does repugnance between various universals, or between various combinations of universals, nor does the fact that a given universal A cannot at the same time be associated, or fused, with two universals of another type, B and C, while it can be fused with either of them singly, — nor does, I say, all this taken together as yet present to us the kind of uniqueness that is meant by individuality. We learn, in brief, that if A means a local sign whereby a given region of the field of vision is distinguished from the rest, and if B and C mean colour experiences, then the combination AB is possible, and the combination AC is also possible, but that AB excludes AC, and cannot co-exist with it. Surely we learn, in such a case, of nothing that establishes any relation except such as ​could exist and constantly does exist amongst ideas, or purely universal objects, wherein there is no trace of individuality. So far, then, the field of vision is not defined as presenting to us individuation.
But one may insist that by this object or things seen before me, I do not mean merely the mass of colour, but the object with which, by experience, touch and muscular sensations have been combined. The “real thing” is a blending of colour experiences with touch and muscle-sensations, which have all come to be localised in what we call objective space. And by the impenetrability of the thing we mean a collection of experienced facts in which touch and muscular sensation play more part, or certainly not less, than visual experience. The whole impenetrable thing, which excludes others from its place, is thus the presented individual of daily experience. In reply to this argument, I admit, at once, that I doubt not the individuality of the thing of ordinary experience, as maturely conceived by us. What I deny is, that its individuality can ever be defined in terms merely of its spatial characters and of its physical exclusion of other things. The individual object of ordinary experience seems individual to us by virtue of the fact that “I,” who behold it, am for myself, in mature life, already an individual, and that this, which occupies this definite relation to me, is therefore individuated by this relation. But how I came to be regarded as an individual is a question not to be decided in terms of sense-presentation. Moreover, the individual of ordinary experience is still further individuated by the fact that it occupies ​a place in the individual whole now called “our space,” or, at all events, the space of “our environment.” But if one is to learn how we first individuated this space, one must not argue in a circle by first pointing out that this thing, in this part of our environment, is, as such, an individual by virtue of its relations to the presupposed whole of surrounding space, and by then saying that surrounding space gets its individuality through the mere summation of the individualities of the things and places that fill it up. We are still to see how the impenetrable thing first becomes presented as an individual. And my comment so far is, that, just as the field of vision, viewed in itself, presents us no individuals, but only sense-qualities, some combinations of which exclude other combinations, just so the addition of other sense-qualities, of local signs belonging to touch and to the muscular sense, in no wise alters, of itself, the logical situation with which we are dealing. The local signs, the sense-qualities, — they are all universals. Their segmentation, their repugnance, is, so far, like the segmentation of good and evil, or the repugnance of A and not-A in general. It presents us, as yet, no individuation, — only varieties and relationships of types. That the sense-qualities are universals, and that the local signs which were to be so important for individuation are universals, is proved by the very experiences to which one refers when one talks of individuation through impenetrability. The concrete thing A, which sense cognises, is not only coloured, but unyielding. What does this mean? It means that touch, sensations of re​sistance, and colour sensations, or that the phenomenal qualities indicated by them, do in our experience fuse. That is, these sense-phenomena are, as they come, not yet individuals, since they are not even necessarily exclusive. Just so, the local signs of touch and vision fuse into the presented place of the thing in the complex called outer space, the colours and their local signs suggesting the local signs of possible touches. Thus the local signs are universals; for they, too, do not even exclude one another so long as they belong to different senses. The concrete thing A is now a more complex union of fused universals than it was when one considered merely the field of vision. As such fused group of universals, it now excludes, or renders impossible, certain other combinations. The colour-quality a, in combination with the touch-quality b, and with the present or suggested local signs of sight and touch, c and d, now proves to be such that, so long as a and b are linked with c and d, no other colour-and-touch group, a' and b' — or, as we concretely say, no other thing A' — can get this same group of local signs, or, as we also say, can get into the same place which A occupies. But by such combinations we define everything except what constitutes the true individuality of A. We define A as a certain combination, or fusion, of universals, which is repugnant to or exclusive of various other combinations of universals. And that is, so far, all that we do. It is precisely as if we said: “I cannot at the same time attend to the melody A and to the entirely unrelated melody A'.” In such a case, our mutually exclusive melodies are not yet defined as ​individuals, although we could for other reasons, yet to be considered, individuate even the melodies. But as the melody which excludes all other melodies from the field of attention at the time when it occupies this field is not thereby presented as an individual, but only as a universal, so the sense-object that excludes others from possessing the local signs which it then presents is not thereby presented as an individual.
The fundamental reason why such highly popular views as the foregoing appear so plausible, and fill so much place in the ordinary accounts, is that it never occurs to us, in ordinary discussion, to ask what it is that makes this individual place or moment an individual at all. We assume that the this is, as such, an individual. But in fact the mere this is the barest of abstractions. It usually becomes an individual, at any moment, by virtue of its relation to myself, the constantly presupposed central individual of daily life. But how came I to be an individual?
Our result, then, so far is, that one might hopefully say: Give me first one single individual, known as segmented and unique, and then I will undertake, with experience enough, to define a whole universe of unique individuals. But our present problem is, how to get that first individual. So far, then, we have a restatement, in quite our own way, of the problem as to our own knowledge of the individual. Either experience or thought, it would seem, must determine such knowledge, but neither can do so, nor can both together; for each appeals to the other in vain to answer the question: What is This Individual? ​
Our other question, as to the metaphysics of individuality, now gets its parallel restatement. Laying the problem of knowledge aside, and passing to Being, to what principle is the individuation of the world due? To the ultimate and immediate brute fact of the segmentation of things? But that answer is impossible. For segmentation, as a mere brute fact, is not identical with uniqueness. Colour is a brute fact; but it is not unique. Good and evil are brute facts, — pain and pleasure, up and down, right and left, past and future, are not only facts, but facts with strong contrasts and segmentations about them. Yet this does not constitute them, in so far, facts or cases of individuality. Individuation is not identical with the brute fact of segmentation.
On the other hand, is individuation due to some rational law of ideal differentiation in the world? Just as little can that be so; for where law differentiates truth, where general processes combine to determine results, the product of such ideal differentiation, or combination, is this or that type of truth, — never this unique case. Individuation is therefore not due to a process that merely specifies universal types. Curves may be of this or of that more and more specified type; but hereby one never defines an individual curve, — only a type of curves.
Individuals are describable enough, if only, — as I said before, — if only you assume other previous individuals to which to relate them. But what universal process, or combination of processes, or overlaying of types, shall produce your first individual?
Thus, then, the individual, as it would seem, must be ​either brute fact or ideally definable result, i.e. combination of universal processes or types. And nevertheless, as now appears, the individual can be neither the one nor the other.
VI THE INDIVIDUAL AS THE OBJECT OF AN EXCLUSIVE INTEREST
To define such a problem exactly is already far more than half the answer. My result, so far, is that individuality, although it is known by and in the unity of consciousness, is a category indefinable in purely theoretical terms. But, in so far, the cause of the individual is not at all a lost cause. As a fact, the world that we live in, as a moral world, although through and through knowable, is even more a practically significant than it is a theoretically definable world. And I may as well at once simply say, that, to my mind, the concept of the individual, in its primary and original sense, is distinctly an ethical concept, and that it is so whether you speak in terms of knowledge or in terms of being. Theoretically definable individuality there is, to be sure, in plenty, if by definition you merely mean the process of designating new individuals through an appeal to relationships to the presupposed individuality of other individuals. Such is the process which I just now exemplified. Individuality is like a ferment. Introduce the germ of it into your world of knowledge, and the universe soon swarms as with yeast, and individuality bubbles ​out everywhere. For in relation to any one individual, you can define countless other individuals. But the first individual you can only know by breathing the breath of a new life into the otherwise dead and stubbornly universal categories of merely abstract theory. Man individuates the objects of his knowledge because he is an ethical being. God individuates the objects of his own world, and knows them as individuals, for no other reason. This will be my own thesis. In short, to use familiar but still not unphilosophical terms, I propose briefly to show that the Principle of Individuation, in us as in reality, is identical with the principle that has sometimes been called Will, and sometimes Love. Our human love is a good name for what first individuates for us our universe of known objects. We have good reason for saying that it is the Divine Love which individuates the real world wherein the Divine Omniscience is fulfilled.
And now the way to this result is simple enough. A child’s first ideas are all unconsciously universal, or vaguely abstract, ideas. He does not early know individuals as such. He does very early know more or less indefinite types. Moreover, not only the child’s early half-conscious ideas, but his first explicitly conscious ideas, are in their origin imitative, and in their nature contrast-effects, due to the comparison of similarities and varieties in his own acts, and in the acts of others, and in the forms and colours of like and unlike objects. And in so far the child’s first conscious ideas must be of what we call the universal, as such. In his first use of language, as Aristotle ​himself already remarked, and as the scholastics often repeat, he “calls all men fathers and mothers,” — or, in other words, uses language not for the individual but for the types, which, in the midst of the shifting variety of his experience, he learns to recognise as the same types, persisting in the many presentations. The many presentations he cannot yet know as many individuals; for he has no such power to grasp single facts for their own sake. Such power comes only late.
The one that persists for the child through the many, — this, by virtue of its persistent contrast with unrecognisable confusions, he gradually learns to recognise as the one. But this one is the universal, the type, the idea. If you do not believe this, watch any young child calling flies “dogs,” or independently recognising pine cones as potatoes, or thoughtfully saying “piece of moon all torn” when he happens to observe a bright star, — and you will know what I mean by asserting that not only the first unconscious general ideas, but also the first explicitly conscious ideas, are of the universal, as such. In all such cases the background of the universe is not yet the individual, but the unrecognisably confused many, the relatively undifferentiated mass of changing contents, which the child does not make out, and does not know except as the background of the universals that he does know.
On the lines thus defined, the child might proceed, for all that I can see, indefinitely, without ever reaching the knowledge of true individuality, were he merely a theoretical thinker. But now observe him ​on another side of his nature. He has a plaything, — say, a lead soldier. He loves it. He breaks it. Now offer him — yes, at once show him — another plaything, another lead soldier, as nearly as possible like the one just broken. Were the broken one not, as such, before the child’s mind, the new one might prove in all respects satisfactory. It has, perhaps, all the universal characters that aroused his interest in the former. But now, will the child, keenly fond of universal types as he intellectually is, — will he be very likely to accept the new soldier as a compensation for the broken one? No. He is very likely to mourn the more vociferously in view of your offer. If you could have hidden the broken soldier before he observed the disaster, and if you could have substituted the other, perhaps the child would never have recognised the loss, and all would have been well. It is not, then, that he theoretically recognises this simple lead soldier as observably unique in type or as definably different from all others. It is that his love for his toy is, in its subjective, instinctive, preconscious type, an exclusive passion, that is, a feeling such that the idea of the two objects that shall at the same time be conceived as equally possible satisfactions of this feeling, is a repugnant, a hateful, idea. Now, at this moment, I say, when the child rejects the other object — the other case that pretends to be an apt appeal to his exclusive love for the broken toy, — at this very moment he consciously individuates the toy. And he does this because he loves the toy with an exclusive love that permits no other. Of course, he indeed knows not why he ​feels thus. This is a reflex of his nature. This is the fashion of his passion. The lost toy is now, for his consciousness, a class with one member and no more. Why? Because that one member is theoretically observed to have definably incommunicable, barely presented, unique characteristics? No. Because this broken toy is here in space while that one is yonder? Impossible. Because the child mourns the mere fact of the breaking, and cannot be comforted by the later presentation of an unbroken toy? No. For if you mend this soldier that is now broken, he will forget at once the whole trouble. He wants, then, to see again an unbroken toy. Why then does he not accept the new one? Because his exclusive interest, as such, is instinctively so set that it declines to recognise, in any unity of consciousness, the presence of two or more equally acceptable cases of the type defined by this love. It is not the object as presented, nor the object as thought, but it is the object as loved, which is such that there can be no other object consciously recognised as a fit representative of this type. The child does not observe that there is presented in this object the marks of individuality. He feels that there ought to be, that there shall be, no rival object of this love. The rival being consciously excluded, one stands in presence of an object concerning which one simply feels that there shall be no other of this particular value. This practical, this passionate, this loving, this at first thoughtless dogma of love, “There shall be no other,” is, I insist, the basis of what later becomes the individuating principle for knowledge. ​
For what happens with the child crying over the toy, happens over and over again in our life. A is presented. So far, one has fact and type. Here, apart from relations to other presupposed individuals, knowledge, as purely theoretical, — knowledge, whether as sense or as thought, — finds only types, qualities, forms, universals; vague or exact, brutally immediate or scientifically computed and verified. B might come, after A or contemporaneously with it, and might show, either just the same contents as were noticed in A, or else contents contrasting with those of A only in universally significant respects, such as position. So far, then, A and B can agree or can differ, — but only as types, as universals. But now let A be loved, or, if you will, hated (since hate is, as Browning has it, a “mask of love”), — but loved or hated with the peculiar sort of exclusive passion that marks some of our deeper instincts, and that, in very diluted form, still colours many even of our gentler and more contemplative concerns. With such exclusive interests one learns to love each of one’s more permanent possessions, — one’s home, books, trinkets; one’s children, and all the other members of one’s family; one’s country, business, life; the mass of contents and relations designated as one’s self, and the other masses known as each of one’s friends. With gentler, but still relatively exclusive interests, one recognises places revisited, complex objects of scientific interest once carefully studied; and so on, indefinitely. Well, A is present and arouses such a consciously exclusive interest. Could there be another object B so similar to A as ​to arouse just this interest? One has to admit, that, theoretically speaking, there might be such an object. But we are sure of one thing, namely, that we could not be contemporaneously conscious of A and B as appealing to this same interest, however like they might seem to be. For the interest is itself, as instinctive emotion, exclusive, and demands an exclusive or unique object. Were an A and a B to present themselves as alike worthy of the interest, one would insist, however alike A and B seemed: “One of you or both of you must be false. For there can be, and shall be, for me but one beloved A, one example of this type, one exclusively interesting object of just this exclusive interest.” Hereby one becomes conscious of A, not as an observed nor yet as a directly intelligible individual, but as an object that appears to represent a class which, according to the exclusive interest, can and shall possess but a single member.
Yet one may indeed say, not all love is thus exclusive. I fully admit the fact. Not all love is individuating. There is much love of unindividuated types. But — and herein lies the ethical significance of the category of Individuality — the ethically organising interests of life are individuating, and they all involve an exclusive element. Ethical love, organising interest, is precisely the sort of interest that cannot consciously serve two masters, and that accordingly individuates, first its master, and then countless other individuals with respect to that master, — viz., individual means to the one end, individual objects of the one science, individual acts ​of the one life, and all the other individuals that in the end fill our known world of experience. It is by an individuating or exclusive interest in living one life for one purpose, that a man becomes a moral individual, one Self, and not a mere collection of empirical social contrast-effects. The love of pleasure is not an exclusive love. Hence it renders its slave vaguely universal. The love of one career, which excludes other ways of living, tends to individualise the professional man. The exclusive love of God, whom nobody else can serve in just the way open to you, tends to individuate your idea of your moral self. In another realm, the vaguer affections, as youth first knows them, are abstract universals, and may demoralise. The love for one beloved, and one only, is an accident which for the first time individuates both the lover and the beloved. The mother’s love, for this infant, is exclusive, and so individuates both mother and child. In brief, it is such affections that, as they give us the consciousness of the One, henceforth tend to make our world one, and hence, by infection, to individuate for us every object in the world. Science, which is primarily of the universal, thus becomes secondarily that whose beloved but far-off goal is, as we said, the knowledge of the individual, — of that individual which love presupposes, but which theory can never finally verify in the observed world of any finite observer. ​
VII THE REALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL
We turn from the world of our knowledge once more to the world of reality. The only observer who could actually and finally verify individuality would be a being who knew his ideal types to be realised in a single world of fact, because whatever he loved was his own, and because what was presented to him fulfilled his love; while his love, in order to be organised and not vaguely infinite, in order to be definite and not confusedly various, in order to be self-possessed and not powerlessly dependent upon chance facts, was an exclusive love, — a love that only one world, one Whole, could fulfil. Such a being would say: “There shall be but this one world.” And for him this world would be fact. The oneness would be the mere outcome and expression of his will. This would then be an individual world, that is, the sole instance of its universal idea or type. In this individual world, every finite fact, by virtue of its relations to the whole, would be in its own measure individual. And individuality, in such a world, would neither be absorbed in one indistinct whole, nor yet be opaque fact. For the exclusive love of the Absolute for this world would render the individuality of the fact secondarily intelligible, as being the fulfilment of the very exclusiveness of the love.
Turning back to the finite world itself, my last observation here as to the general metaphysics of ​individuality would be that individuality, in so far as it is present in the finite world, is essentially a teleological category. Objects are individuals in so far as they are unique expressions of essentially exclusive ideals, ends, Divine decrees. This consideration must govern every concrete application of our category. In biology, the individual viewed as the unique variation of its type has often been made, of late, as it was by Darwin, the centre of the definition of individuality as known to that science. That such absolutely unique variations exist cannot, I suppose, be proved, except upon presuppositions of the sort herein defined. But the teleological interest of such variations for the process of evolution makes this provisional definition of the biological individual — namely, as a mass of living matter sufficiently well organised to represent apparently unique variations of a type — the most philosophically interesting of the various biological definitions of individuality, just because the unique variation is, as such, a conception of a relatively teleological significance for the evolutionary theory. If anywhere such unique variations are unobservable, one has on one’s hands only an indefinite universal, — masses of living matter alike except as to their place; and then one might as well call the descendants of any given cell a single individual.
As to our old friend, Socrates the moral individual, he is and can be metaphysically differentiated and individuated only by the fact, if it be a fact, that the Absolute finds in him the fulfilment of an exclusive interest, such as, in this individual world, nobody else ​can, or, from God’s point of view, nobody else shall fulfil. This exclusive interest might, of course, be more or less met by Socrates the biological variation, — the unique temperament, unlike that of other sons of men. But in any truly moral sense it can only be met in case the ideal of Socrates, the meaning of his life in its wholeness, is such as no other moral process in the universe can fulfil. And this I take to be, in fact, the ultimate meaning of the individuality of Socrates. The meaning implies, of course, that Socrates the moral individual shall not cease from the world until his goal is fulfilled.
As to what has been called individualism in general, in the social and practical sense of the term, — as we referred to it in the first section of this Part of our paper, so now we observe that its eternal significance lies in the fact that since individuals are the objects, and, as moral individuals, the embodiments, of exclusive interests, such as cannot twice be realised, the last word of philosophy to the individual must be: Be loyal, indeed, to the universe, for therein God’s individuality is expressed; but be loyal, too, to the unique. Be unique, as your Father in Heaven is unique.
VIII INDIVIDUALITY AND WILL
The circle of our inquiry is, in a very general sense, complete. We have seen that a theoretical view of the world implies the wholeness, the completion, of the unity of the Absolute Consciousness ​in a single moment. We have seen that this completion demands the presence of a factor not separate from thought and experience, yet not definable in terms either of bare thought or of the data of immediate experience, in so far as they are merely felt, or are present as the merely sensuous fulfilment of thought. This new factor we have defined as Will. We have seen that it does not form merely one of the contents of experience to which thought refers, but determines the world which fulfils thought to be this world rather than any other of the abstractly possible but not genuinely possible worlds. We have defined this aspect of the Universal Consciousness as its individuating aspect. Turning to the concept of the Individual, we have seen, on the other hand, that it is definable only as the object of Will. The object of Will must have contents, and must have a universal character; but as individual object it is defined neither by its contents nor by its character, in so far as this character is conceived by thought. As individual, the object of Will is the object of an exclusive interest, or love, which can permit no other to take its place. Thus knowledge, for its own completion, requires both Will as an attribute of the Absolute Knower, and Individuality in the world, as the object that expresses the will, or love, of the Absolute. But, since contents, as conceived by thought or presented by sense, do not define individuality, therefore in case we have reason to assume the presence in the world of various individuals, we are not forced to draw any conclusions as to the kind of variety or separation of the contents ​of the world which this variety of individuals implies. The same contents may, for instance, form a part of very various individuals, in so far as the same contents may be the object of various individuating interests, each one of which excludes all other objects, while all refer to the same contents. It is in this sense that even in our ordinary experience different wills can individuate, in different ways, the same object, as many worshippers enjoy the same church, which is an individual in very different senses for all of them.
It follows then, already, that nobody may assume, in advance, any given segmentation of the world, as Professor Howison’s theory does, in order to define a given type of individuation as real. If the Divine Will involves in its unity many ideals, purposes, interests, intents, it may well appear that the world of fact, viewed in the light of these various interests, may prove to be a world of many individuals. But one will not be obliged, in consequence, to break up the unity of the world of knowledge in order to find room for the presence of the various interests that together constitute the organism of the Divine Will. If a certain kind of moral independence amongst these various interests or wills which constitute the Divine Organism is the morally highest conceivable form of life; if, in order that the Divine Will should be the best, it must be differentiated into many forms of will, which do not wholly predetermine the one the other, but which freely unite to constitute the whole: then this variety will exist, precisely because it is the best; but the unity of the world of knowledge, by virtue ​of which we obtain our rational assurance that the best is realised, will not be sacrificed for the sake of obtaining room for the exercise of this free variety of will. Professor Howison breaks up the world into many worlds of thought and many spheres of knowledge, merely in order to insure the immediate variety and independence of Will. To do this is to fall into the now exposed fallacy of regarding the category of Individuality as a matter of such a segmentation of contents as would be definable in purely theoretical terms. On the contrary, as we now know, the unity of the world of knowledge presupposes, indeed, the existence of individuality and of Will, but neither the contents of the world of knowledge as immediately felt data, nor the ideas present in that world and fulfilled in the data, can define or present the means by which, or the sense in which, this same world is individuated. Thus the Will individuates according to its own needs; and if it needs for its fulfilment free individuals, it will possess them, and its life will be constituted by theirs; and, while the world of thought and of fact will present nothing that conflicts with such individuation, its unity will no more be thereby broken into fragments of knowledge and experience than, to refer to Schopenhauer’s well-known metaphor, the sunlight is shattered by the various winds that blow through it. ​
PART IV THE SELF-CONSCIOUS INDIVIDUAL
The concluding considerations in the foregoing Part of our discussion have been meant to be only suggestions. We now come directly to the serious problem: What is the nature of a self-conscious individual? As has already been indicated in the considerations just cited, my reply will in the end lay stress upon three theses: (1) The Absolute is a self-conscious individual, and the only ultimately real individual, because the only ultimately and absolutely whole individual. As such the Absolute is unique, embodies one Will, and realises this will in the unity of its one life. (2) On the other hand, every finite moral individual is precisely as real and as self-conscious as the moral order requires him to be. As such, every finite, moral, and self-conscious individual is unique, and, in his own measure, free, since there is an aspect of his nature such that nothing in all the universe of the Absolute except his own choice determines him, in this one aspect of his nature, to be whatever he is, and since no other finite individual could take his place, share his self-consciousness, or accomplish his ideal. He is unique, first, in that the object, namely, the Moral Goal, which he sets before himself, and with reference to which he is this ​self-conscious being, is for him the object of his exclusive interest; an object for which, in his eyes, no other could be substituted so long as he remains himself. He is unique, moreover, in that no other fulfilment of his ideal than his own attainment of that goal could meet his exclusive interest, so that no other self than himself could in such wise attain that goal as to fulfil his interest therein. He is self-conscious by virtue of his knowing his interest in his ideal as such an exclusive interest, and as the central interest of his moral personality. He has an ideal, because only in so far as he has an ideal is he a person at all. And now I shall also maintain: (3) There is no conflict between the first and the second of the foregoing theses, so that the uniqueness of the Absolute Individual, his inclusive unity, his freedom, his self-possession, hinders in no whit the included variety, the relative freedom, the relative separateness, of the finite moral individuals, who, in their own grade of reality, are as independent of one another, in their freedom of choice, but also as dependent upon one another, in the interlinked contents of their lives, as the moral order requires. They are not, like the Absolute, whole individuals, for each, as Professor Howison expressly admits, needs all the others. But the freedom of each finite moral individual is part of the Divine freedom, — not an absolutely separate part, but a part having its own relative freedom, — a differentiated element of this freedom itself. The uniqueness of each moral individual is a part of that which renders the Divine life, in its wholeness, unique. The self-consciousness of each finite individual is a portion ​of the Divine Self-Consciousness. The One Will of the Absolute is a One that is essentially and organically composed of Many. These many forms of will harmonise with the Whole, just by being, in a relative measure, free in respect one of another. The many forms of will form One, because it is best — is an aspect of the perfection of the Divine Selfhood — that they should do so. The One Will stands differentiated into many, because in such variety of ideals there is greater significance than in a merely dead and abstract unity. The many ideals are indeed all thus subject, even in their very freedom, to the condition that their various embodiments of freedom should be such as ultimately to unite in the one system of the Absolute Will; but this condition simply does not exhaustively predetermine what each ideal contains or expresses, since the best type of unity is precisely such a unity as consists of elements which embody a universal type, but which are not exhaustively predetermined either by that type or by one another. The sort of dependence which each individual thus constituted has upon other individuals and upon the Whole is precisely the sort of dependence demanded by the moral world, namely, the dependence involved for me when I say that unless I, in my private capacity, will what harmonises with the Absolute Will as such, I shall be overruled by the other wills that (in that case, despite me) harmonise in the Whole. Less dependence than this upon the constitution of the “City of God” itself, no individual beside the Absolute could have in any moral world. More dependence, less individual freedom than this, our ​theory does not demand. A world of individuals more separate than this, more endowed with absolute caprice than this, would be a world of anarchy, no “City of God,” but a moral hell. The only possible moral world is a world where various individuals are so free from one another, so relatively separate from mutual predetermination, that each has his own share of the Divine Will, his own unique fashion of determining his attitude towards the Whole, while all are so related to one another, and to the Absolute, that they do realise, when viewed altogether, the unity of the Absolute Ideal. Substantially as much as this Professor Howison admits in every word in which he recognises the moral relations of the various free individuals of his world. Exactly such a constitution we assert, when we declare that it is God’s Will, in freely differentiated, various, and unique forms, that appears as identical with the various individual finite wills, but so appears in them that the total constitution of this world of wills embodies the one Divine Will wherein all these free elements are united, organised, harmonised.
So far, our present theses in general. We shall develope them by treating, first, of the finite self-conscious individual. Him we shall consider, first as empirical psychology knows him, and then as metaphysical and ethical considerations define his true nature. For whoever speaks of the finite self-conscious individual, must begin with the facts of our human natural history. And whoever studies our natural history, must remember that empirical psychology raises, but does not by itself solve, the phil​osophical problem: What, in my real essence, am I, this person? In the proper union of psychology with philosophy lies the solution of this problem. Having studied finite individuality in ourselves, we shall proceed to the question of the relation of our individuality to the Absolute, by briefly considering in what sense our Absolute is a self-conscious individual, and what is our relation to such absolute individuality. A reference to the problem of Immortality will close this Part of our paper.
I EMPIRICAL SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS CONTENTS
First, then, for the empirical aspect of finite self-consciousness. I talk of myself, of my moral worth, of my choice, of my freedom, of my moral personality. What fact in the universe do I refer to when I thus talk of myself? Is not the self of my inner self-consciousness a mere collection of accidental experiences and processes, — a mere heap of feelings, of associations, of beliefs? Is there anything really permanent or eternal about me? Am I not a mere child of circumstance, an offspring of my ancestors, a result of an evolutionary process, a chaos of bodily products? What concrete facts do I think when I think of myself? Is it not a mass of internal sensations, of fleeting thoughts, of halting memories, that I refer to when I speak of myself? And, now, how can this chance product of ancestry and of circumstance, this creature of yesterday and to-day, ​have any eternal nature or significance? Can there be any abiding core of personality about me?
To these questions our present general answer is this: If you ask as to what facts of experience go together to fill up the contents of my actual self-consciousness, you find, as every psychologist knows, that the consciousness of self is, in its complexity, the most delicate, unstable, and intricate of all the phenomena studied by psychology. But if you ask what our self-consciousness, when once it has come to exist, really means, — then you ask a question that no psychology, no mere natural history of mind, can answer, but that, as I hold, an idealistic philosophy can answer. One has to distinguish sharply between the brute facts of self-consciousness, as psychology studies them, and their true meaning, as philosophy defines it. As a matter of brute fact, and of mere natural history, my private self-consciousness is the most complex and evanescent thing about me. A headache deranges the empirical self; a social annoyance confuses it; a passing mood overwhelms it; a moment of drowsiness eclipses it; death erelong utterly hides it. But if one asks, not, What happens to the empirical self, or when does it come to view? but, What value, meaning, metaphysical reality, is indicated by self-consciousness whenever, especially in the moral world, it comes to light, as the principle of choice, of intent, of reasonableness? — then the only answer is, that the rational self-consciousness, wherever it comes to light, reveals itself as of eternal significance, as an embodiment of God’s plan. How can this be? How can this ​creature of circumstance, this evanescent shadow, be also the embodiment and revealer of eternal truth? Let us try to indicate the answer to this question.
II GENESIS OF THE EMPIRICAL EGO
As a matter of natural history, my idea of myself is of course a growth. No infant begins by being self-conscious. One has to learn to be self-conscious. My ordinary self-consciousness (or, as the psychologists technically call it, my empirical self-consciousness) is a product of experience, slowly woven together according to the laws of the association of ideas. If you ask what inner experiences form a basis for the formation of my idea of myself, the answer is, first of all, my experiences of my own internal bodily sensations, in particular of my “visceral” and my “muscular” sensations, including many masses of skin and joint sensations. These vary, but their routine remains on the whole relatively uniform, while my experiences of what I see or hear or externally touch vary endlessly. So far, the self is a relatively stable group of what are called the sensations of the common sensibility. To these get early joined my experiences of my emotions, and my feelings of voluntary control. ​But now enters a factor of great importance for my later self-consciousness. A great deal of my natural consciousness of myself depends upon certain habits that grow up in me in connexion with my early social experiences. Very early the child comes to recognise more or less dimly that there are in the world the experiences, intents, and interests of other people, — of his parents, of his nurses, of his play-mates. Now, the importance of all this recognition is of the vastest. For hereby the child comes to contrast his own inner self of bodily sensations and of emotions with the ideally conceived inner life of other people. The contrast gives the original self of bodily sensations and emotions a wholly transformed meaning. Henceforth, in a way that few of us sufficiently recognise, and that even the psychologists have usually ignored, the natural self-consciousness of a man becomes, and remains, the result of a certain very intricate and beautiful contrast-effect. I am consciously myself, in ordinary life, by virtue of the contrast between my inner life as I feel it and the inner life of somebody else, whose existence I believe in, and whose life I find set over against mine. Am I in a quarrel? — then I am conscious of myself as contrasted with the mind of my foe. Am I in conversation with you? — then I am self-conscious by virtue of the contrast between your expressed mind and mine. Am I in love? — then I exist for myself by contrast with the mind of my love. Ordinary self-consciousness is a contrast direct. I appear to myself in the light of my contrast with you. ​The result of the contrast, however, is manifest. From the first, I repeat, we take note of ourselves by a simple or direct contrast with what we regard as indicating to us the minds, the feelings, purposes, or power, of our interesting social fellows. Here belongs, for instance, the self-consciousness of simple rivalry, expressed in our early life in the childish insight that yonder social fellow wants to do so and so, but cannot do it “as well as I can.” In such a case, the contrast upon which the individuality of self-consciousness depends is of a relatively simple sort. So too with the self-consciousness of obstinacy, of social wilfulness, and of anger. Here, what I want is known to me by virtue of its contrast with what another wants, and this contrast, rendering relatively clear my consciousness of my own intent, tends, by its very existence, and by reason of the blindness of my passion, to inflame the opposition. In a more benign, but also, as I judge, in even a more primitive form, appears the simple contrast of ego and non-ego in all my imitative, or explicitly plastic and socially submissive, states of consciousness. Where I long to make out what my fellow means by his doings, and to that end try myself to repeat them, when I listen to his words and try to understand them, I constantly contrast what I mean with what he means, what I can so far do with what he can do, and in such ways increase the material of my self-consciousness. Of this highly important process the well-known questioning age in children is full. In all such ways, then, I increase the data of my self-consciousness by contrasting myself with my neighbour in a relatively ​simple or direct, but endlessly repeated fashion. More complex grows the contrast of ego and non-ego when my attention is not merely attracted to the states of my neighbour’s mind as indicated to me in one region of my mental life, and as thus directly contrasted with mine, but is also attracted to the fact that my neighbour is aware of me, has his opinion of me, and is concerned in me very much as I am concerned in him. For now I learn to contrast my neighbour’s view of me, not only with my states as they already exist in me, but also with the view of myself that hereupon, by virtue of my natural vanity, modesty, obstinacy, or plasticity, gets aroused in me as my response to his conceived opinion of me. My neighbour approves me. And now I both note and value myself more. My neighbour dislikes my looks, my actions, my voice, the selfishness of my behaviour. I come also to take note of this view of myself. It arouses a response of resentment, of contempt, of shame, of obstinacy, of desire to reform, or of wish that I were another. And now I am conscious of myself in a very complex and indirect way, as well as by virtue of the direct contrast. My ideal self, the self that I want to be, as well as my real self, begins to emerge in this contest. What I am and what my neighbour is, what I am and what I seem to him to be, what he thinks of me, and what in response I think of him, — all these pairs now contrast. Moreover, I henceforth take note of what I myself aim to be. One may observe, however, that, just in so far as such experiences introduce this ideal element into my idea of myself, they peculiarly tend to give me ​fixity, connectedness in inner selfhood. By my ideal I learn to know myself. The contrast of ego and non-ego grows, however, still more and more complex as all the foregoing motives join in endlessly varied interweaving, in that long drama of social warfare and of social harmony, of friendship and of enmity, of private interest and of public spirit, which passes before us as mind daily meets mind in the expression of feeling and of opinion, in the play of love and of hate, throughout our long, and, by nature, far too flickering existence. Everywhere it is the social non-ego by the light of which the social ego is seen, too often with a luridly confused irrationality, — in happy lives, however, with a gradually attained relative fixity and clearness.
But what motive, above all, tends, in this chaos of empirical self-consciousness, towards an ideal unity, fixity, and clearness in my insight into what, after all, I am for my own consciousness? I have already pointed out that this unifying motive is, above all, the presence of an ideal of what, amidst all the confusion of my life, I mean to be. I repeat, by my ideal I learn to know myself as one self, with one contrast that runs through all the endlessly varying contrasts of ego and non-ego. Surely no teacher needs to be reminded that one common name for all these motives that tend towards unity of selfhood and of character in a growing mind is: Whatever tends to give one’s life the unity of a conscious plan. A sane self-consciousness involves a more or less clearly defined ideal of conduct, such as can be central in all the processes that tend to bring the special ​contrasts between ego and non-ego into sight. If I really know what on the whole I mean to be, the chaotic succession of empirical states of my ego which varying experience brings to me will not break up my deeper unity. This knowledge of what I mean to be is in part an expression of the habits of my calling, of the mere routine of my business, as these habits and this routine gradually get established for me by fortune and by training, in the family and in the world. And so far, indeed, one can have merely the self-consciousness of one’s little hoard of maxims, — the indispensable but relatively Philistine selfhood of the man who gradually becomes, settled into his way and place in life. Such self-consciousness, which we all, in our imperfection, must more or less depend upon, is so far only a sort of abstract, or composite image, of the common elements of our actual states of self-consciousness as fortune moulds them. Our social habits get formed: we have our range, our private life, our round of friends, our daily tasks. These involve relatively constant repetitions of similar states of self-consciousness. From repetition springs inner constancy. And, so far, we in the end find our level, and take ourselves to be whatever the world has made of us.
But there is another and a much higher aspect of self-consciousness. My plan of life is not merely my way, but my ideal as such. I do not mean to be merely what by worldly chance I am. And here the very chaos of social accidents to which, particularly in youth, we are subject, proves serviceable in bringing to pass a most important contrast within the ​world of one’s self-consciousness; namely, the contrast between the ego that fortune has produced, in view of my calling and my limited sphere of action, and the ego that, as I more or less clearly feel, might have been, if these or these interesting accidents of my life, these or these passing moods of self-consciousness, had proved as fruitful and habitual as they were transient and inspiring. A man who has any but the most prosaic self-consciousness is likely to remember not infrequently what he might have been if other people had but given him a fair chance, if that lost skill or that noble purpose had proved stable, or if that dear friend had lived. The sailor, regretting his dog’s-life at sea, and fantastically conceiving, during his sober and monotonous voyages, a career such as would have been worthy of him, on that land of whose actual life he knows only what brief spells of drunken idleness, when he is in port, reveal to him; the unsuccessful mechanic, who barely earns a hard living, but who would have been, as he tells you, a very great man if his enemy had not stolen his early inventions and crushed his budding opportunities to death, — these men are self-conscious, in so far as they contrast a painfully real with a hopelessly lost ideal self. You never know a man’s self-consciousness until you learn something of this graveyard of perished ideal selves which his experience has filled for him, and which his memory has adorned with often very fantastic inscriptions.
But the ideal self need not remain this — still chaotic — collection of now changeless but forever ​defeated illusions. It is indeed well for us that we have such defeated illusions to contrast with the prosaic reality of life’s ordinary self-consciousness; for from the ashes of dead selves the very life of the spirit may spring, and, being such as we are, we never win ideals except through first lamenting dear and lost realities. But the ideal self, in the proper sense, comes into sight only in so far as we can learn from life that whatever we are, or plan or carry out, in the world that we see or touch, it is none of it an expression of ourselves as we ought to be; since the moral task of life is simply not to be accomplished by any one visible deed, by the success of any undertaking, by the fulfilling of any mortal office. That man is imperfect; that the moral law is too high for him now completely to accomplish the tasks that it sets him; that man, as he is, is weak, prone to error, doomed to failure even in the midst of his best successes, — these are observations that popular wisdom has for ages repeated. They can be interpreted despairingly. But wise men interpret them strenuously, and get from them a definition of self-consciousness which may be called the distinctively Ethical definition.
For this definition we are now prepared. My lost ideals, my buried illusions, illustrate to me my own nature, as this ego, in so far as they set off the chaos of my chance empirical selfhood against the conceived perfection of an ideal life that, as I vainly feel, might have been, but is not. I often am disposed to say: “That lost ideal self is my true self. For it has unity, connexion, orderliness, about it. ​But the actual life is a heap of chance empirical fragments of personality.” Yet there is a higher view than this. A rational conscience says to me: “Why need the ideal self be lost? Conceive rather, in some rational terms, what you wisely can mean to be. Let this meaning, this intent, be attentively looked upon as expressing an unattained goal, with reference to which your experience is to be moulded, harmonised, rationalised. Keep this goal in sight.” To do so involves rationally significant Attention, i.e. attention such as regards a specific content — namely, here, your ideal — as something to be held present before you, to the exclusion of all barely possible but, for you, rejected ideals. In the light of this ideal, view all your chaos of experience. Now it all has unity, for it is lighted by your intention to bring it all into subordination to that ideal. Now, also, whatever happens to you, you live one life; namely, the life of aiming towards that goal. And now, once more, the very remoteness and ideality of the goal assures the unity of your life. For the ideal is not something that you can to-morrow attain and so have done with. Your ideal is precisely harmony, organisation, unity of life. This, you as you are can never completely fulfil. But for just that reason the ideal goal, shining through all your experience, makes that experience seem to you as one in intent, in purpose, in meaning, despite its empirical variety. Just because your ideal is above you, your real life becomes a single life, for it is now a life of seeking for the goal. The quest is one, however chaotic the wilderness through which the Self, ​the knight of this quest, like Browning’s Childe Roland, finds his strenuous way.
Now indeed you know yourself as one Self, as a person. For, first, you know your empirical self as the Seeker, meaning, intending, aiming at, that life-ideal; and here you have a contrast of real and ideal self. And, secondly, since your ideal is this ideal, the expression of the meaning of your unique experience, you can rightly contrast yourself with all the rest of the world’s life. And now we may notice this surprising fact: What from a psychological point of view appeared to us as the evanescence, the infinite delicacy, the natural instability, of your selfhood, is now to be viewed, in the light of your ideal, as the essential uniqueness of just your significant experience of selfhood. For just what as mere content is so fleeting, is in the light of the one and unique goal a process tending and striving thither.
We are now ready to pass from the psychological to the metaphysical point of view. The facts of experience are empirically viewed, when you take them just as they chance to come, and try from an external point of view to observe their laws. The same facts are viewed as expressing the nature of reality, as having a metaphysical bearing, whenever you are able to view a group of these facts as embodying, in its wholeness, some one idea, and so having some one inner unity of meaning or of significance. The reality that in such a case you each time deal with is an absolute reality only in case the contents of experience that you consider, are, when taken together, identical with the whole life of God. In all other cases, you deal ​with a reality of some lower grade, — a genuine reality, in its own grade, precisely in so far as it consists of contents bound into some unity of meaning by virtue of some one ideal.
Well, the real Self is the totality of our empirical consciousness when viewed as having unity of meaning, and as exemplifying, or in its totality fulfilling, an idea. Now this idea is, for us, as we have seen, an ideal, which is never wholly embodied at any one empirical moment of the human life that now is. This ideal gives our life its meaning. If our life can be viewed as ever attaining that goal, — say, in a superhuman existence, — then all our individual experience, viewed as a whole, will appear as a total embodiment of this meaning. As we now are, our life that is has unity and meaning only in so far as we regard it as the struggle towards the embodiment of that ideal, which, hovering in still unattainable remoteness above all our earthly existence, gives, by its pervasive contrast, unity to our present fragmentary selfhood. And it is such a way of viewing life that prepares us for the metaphysical theory of the Ego.
One word more here as to the sorts of self that can be defined by referring to a life-ideal. I have spoken as if an individual life-ideal were, as such, a wholly good, a truly worthy, ideal. As a fact, any individual life-ideal, as such, has of necessity a large element of rationality, and so of goodness, about it. On the other hand, a relatively — although never a wholly — diabolical or damnable individual life-ideal is perfectly possible; and the relative unity of an individual self can be, and often is, defined with reference to just ​such a relatively bad or devilish ideal. In such cases, the goal of life remains ideal, but the individual is an evil-doer, a relatively lost soul. There are such lives in plenty in the world. They have their own degree of selfhood, unity, ideality; but a deep colouring of baseness runs through it all.
Ill REALITY OF THE EGO
And now I finally turn from the empirical to the metaphysical. I ask: What reality has the individual self in the universe of God? But in answering this question I indeed cannot and must not ignore the lesson of the foregoing empirical theory. That theory points out that what one empirically means by the self or self-consciousness is an extremely variable mass of mental contrasts, whose empirical unity depends upon conditions of the utmost complexity. I now ask: In what sense, despite this complexity and variability of the individual self-consciousness as it comes to us empirically, have we still a right to say that there is in the universe a real, and, within the range of our individual experience, a permanent being, to be called this individual Ego? I shall answer this question in a way whose proof I can only sketch. To state my whole case would involve a long course of lectures on metaphysics. I have time, here, chiefly for a relatively dogmatic statement, with mere indications of proof. I shall begin by repeating explicitly, that each one of us knows in his own case ​such a real Ego only in so far as each of us finds his experience, in some coherent and connected way, determined and pervaded by a conscious and comprehensive plan of his life, which he experiences as his own plan, attentively selected from amongst the plans of life that experience has suggested. This plan need not be abstractly formulated. It must be concretely present.
A plan in life, pervading and comprehending my experiences, is, I say, the conditio sine qua non of the very existence of myself as this one, whole, connected Ego. If I have no such plan, whether abstractly defined or concretely intuited, I simply do not exist as one Ego, but remain a disconnected mass of fragments. But such a plan means that we are conscious of ourselves as continually setting before ourselves an ideal, noble or relatively base, good or relatively devilish; a model of what this individual life and its successive experiences, in our view, ought to be. This ideal, in the case of every rationally self-conscious human being, is such that we never do fulfil this ideal, complete this plan, or live up to this purpose of life, by means of actually attained experiences of life. Every human deed falls short of what the plan of life of the steadily self-conscious being demands; and that, too, whether this plan itself is divine or is, relatively speaking, damnable. Our ideal, in so far as it is a genuine ideal, is never attained at any temporal point of our experienced existence as individual beings. We never become, for our own rational consciousness, perfect individual selves. Yet all our empirical life has meaning, and constitutes the life of one Self, ​just in so far, but only in so far, as this our empirical life is consciously viewed by ourselves as a process of progressing towards the fulfilment of our individual and consciously chosen ideal.
In consequence, the true or metaphysically real Ego of a man, as I venture now with emphasis to repeat, is simply the totality of his experience in so far as he consciously views this experience as, in its meaning, the struggling but never completed expression of his coherent plan in life, the changing but never completed partial embodiment of his one ideal. His empirical ego, or collection of egos, is constituted by his relatively self-conscious moments just as they chance to come. His metaphysically real Ego is constituted by his experiences in so far as they mean for him the struggle towards his one ideal. A man’s Ego, therefore, exists as one Ego, only in so far as he has a plan in life, a coherent and conscious ideal, and in so far as his experience means for him the approach to this ideal. Whoever has not yet conceived of such an ideal is no one Ego at all, whether you view him empirically or metaphysically, but is a series of chance empirical selves, more or less accidentally bound together by the processes of memory. In the consciousness of such an incoherent being, if he is of human rank, there is indeed, in general, empirical self-consciousness; that is, there is a fragmentary empirical embodiment of the form of self-consciousness. But what I mean is, that, in advance of the coherent life-ideal, — the consciously chosen, even if abstractly undefined, plan of life, — there is no metaphysical truth in saying that the em​pirical life of any man is the life of any one finite being who, in his wholeness, has any single definably clear and precise contrast with the rest of the life of God. The empirical ego, apart from the unity of life-plan, can be as truly called a thousand selves as one Self. In short, the term “person,” in its metaphysical sense, can mean only the moral individual, i.e. the individual viewed as meaning or aiming towards an ideal, good or relatively bad, angelic or relatively diabolical, lawful or relatively anarchical; for only the moral individual, as a life lived in relation to a plan, a finite totality of experience viewed as meaning for itself a struggle towards conformity to an ideal, has, in the finite world, at once an all-pervading unity, despite the unessential accidents of disease and of sense, and a single clear contrast, in its wholeness, to the rest of the universe of experience. The consciousness of self, however, everywhere depends upon contrasts. And the individual is one Self, for himself, only in so far as he knows one sort of contrast between himself and the universe.
As to the relation of this individual, as thus defined, to God, I shall be equally explicit. I assert: (1) That this individual experience is identically a part of God’s experience, i.e. not similar to a portion of God’s experience, but identically the same as such portion; and (2) that this individual’s plan is identically a part of God’s own attentively selected and universal plan. God’s consciousness forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment; and whatever is, has, in general, such relation to that whole as, in our consciousness, the partial ​elements of any one moment of consciousness have to the whole of that moment. On the other hand, I insist that this individual’s experience, even by the aid of the very conditions that force psychology to view it as an evanescent and unspeakably delicate product of the most various and unstable factors, is, when viewed in relation to an exclusive ideal, — in other words, when metaphysically viewed, — a unique experience, and consequently a unique constituent of the Divine life, nowhere else capable of being represented in God’s universe, and therefore metaphysically necessary to the fulfilment of God’s own life; so that, thus viewing himself, the individual can say to God, in Meister Eckhart’s beautiful words: “Were I not, God himself could not be.” For so the individual can say: Without just my unique experience in its wholeness, and in its meaning as a totality of life progressively fulfilling an individual ideal, God’s life would be incomplete; or, in other words, God would not be God. Furthermore, as to the individual plan or ideal, as such, I assert: (1) It is identically a part of God’s plan, so that when I attentively find my life one with reference to the ideal which it aims progressively to fulfil, but can never, humanly speaking, attain, the attention that thus selectively determines my ideal is not similar to, but actually identical with, the fragment of the divine Will as defined earlier in this paper, i.e. with an element of the divine Attention. I assert: (2) On the other hand, this individual attention of mine, whereby my ideal is mine and whereby my experience is the life of one Self in view of the ideal, — this ​individual possession of mine is a unique fact in the unity of the Divine life, a fact determined to what it is, not at all completely, nor in any fashion essentially, by any other fact or system of facts in the Divine life. It is not right to say: God in his wholeness is, as such whole, the maker of what I am. In my grade of reality, I am unique as this element in and of the Divine Will. Nothing else than my will gives my will its essential character. From this point of view, the individual will, in its essentially although always incomplete self-conscious determination to the pursuing of just this ideal, can say to God in his wholeness: “Were I not, your Will would not be”; for had I not this my unique attentive choice of my own ideal, God’s Will would be incomplete. He would not have willed just what I, and I alone, as this fragment of his life, as this member of the Divine Choice, will in him, and as this unique portion of his complete Will.
I shall, then, also strenuously insist that the individual, as I define him, is free, — free with the identical freedom of God, whereof his freedom is a portion. For there is (1) in his consciousness an element which is determined by absolutely nothing in the whole of God’s life outside of this individual himself. Furthermore (2) this element, namely, his attentively selected ideal, is determined neither by the contents of the individual’s experience nor by the mere necessity of the laws of the individual’s thought. For the thesis that the individual is thus free, I have prepared the way by showing that there is an element of freedom universally present in the ​Divine life, and identical in nature with the rational essence of what we call Attention, wherever attention is viewed as rationally significant. For in so far as in us there is rationally significant attention, and in so far as this rationally significant attention is, as such, the free element of the Divine life, it may prove to be free in us as it is everywhere free in God. The individual attention, in just that aspect in which it constitutes the individual one Self, is peculiarly thus a rationally significant attention, since it concerns that choice of an ideal which gives the individual the whole unity and meaning of his existence. Therefore, as we shall maintain, in choosing the ideal, which is the one means of giving his life the unity of Self, the individual is free with identically the same freedom as is God’s freedom, only that the individual’s freedom is not the whole of God’s freedom, but is a unique part thereof.
Meanwhile, it is never the case that the Self first exists, and then afterwards freely chooses its ideal. On the contrary, the Self exists only as the conscious chooser, the attentively free possessor, of this ideal. The Self finds itself only as having already begun to choose, never as now first choosing. It knows itself only as the being with this ideal. Had it not this ideal, this individual Self would not exist at all. But its choice of this ideal, or, in other words, its very existence as this Self, is determined, in its essential character, by nothing in all of God’s life outside of this unique and individual attitude of attention itself. Therefore, while our current consciousness of our empirical freedom to do this or that is no doubt ​largely — yes, mainly — illusory, our very existence as Selves is the embodiment of the Divine freedom. So that, once more, the individual can say to God: “Were I not free, you would not be free.”
On the other hand, in order to prove the individual free, you have indeed first to prove that God is free as well as rational. For then, when the uniqueness of the individual’s attention to his constituent ideal, to the plan that makes up the very essence of his Selfhood, appears amongst the facts of God’s world as that without which this Ego could neither be nor be conceived, the already demonstrated Divine freedom may be applied to this unique case of the universal principle.
IV THE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE ABSOLUTE
The proof of the foregoing theses, as I have said, can here only be indicated. The essential considerations, however, may be reduced briefly to these: We have seen how our empirical self-consciousness gets formed; namely, as what we have called a social contrast-effect, which arises within the circle of our actual and empirical consciousness. We are primarily conscious of the self as a very varying, unstable, and ill-defined mass of contents — thoughts, wishes, interests, memories, desires, sensations — which we find different from, and opposed to, or contrasted with, a largely ideal world of contents which we conceive as the minds, wishes, interests, ​etc., of others, namely, our fellows in society. This primary self in time gets unified, in so far as we come to contrast the varying self-contents with more or less determinate ideals, concerns, plans, which give life a certain unity. From this point of view, I am one Self only in so far as I am conscious of my life — of memories, aspirations, devices, failures, triumphs — as tending, or at least striving; and therefore as known by contrast with, or in the light of, a certain type of fulfilled consciousness, — of attainment, — which is now, as the ideal Self or Other Self, the determining principle that makes my life the life of one being. We have asserted that if this ideal goal becomes an exclusive goal, such that no other is viewed as the possible goal of this life, and if this goal is viewed as one which, if attained through any other life than mine, would not be attained as I meant it to be attained, then my life is defined for me as the life of a unique, and so of a genuinely individual Self. We have asserted, moreover, that a Self so defined is a metaphysically real individual, and is thus defined not only from our point of view, but also from the point of view of the Absolute. We have asserted that such an individual selfhood — the selfhood of a moral Self — is a real fragment of what we have called the Self-Consciousness of the Absolute.
As we began our empirical analysis from below, so we must begin our necessarily incomplete defence of our metaphysical theses from above, and must first briefly explain our application of the category of Self-Consciousness to the Absolute Being. ​
After the foregoing general analysis of the function of self-consciousness, nothing, at first sight, could seem more incongruous than to speak of our Absolute, in its wholeness, as possessing, in any essential sense, an absolute self-consciousness. For the category of Self-Consciousness appears in our account as primarily one of limitation, of contrast, of relative separation between Self and Other. But the Absolute Experience and Will form, as we have asserted, one Unity of consciousness, one moment or instant of fulfilled life, over against which there is no external Other wherewith this whole could be contrasted. If I know myself by contrast with my neighbour or with my distant ideal, how can the Absolute, who has no neighbours, and no unfulfilled ideals, know such a contrast between himself and somebody else? In this sense, one would say, the Absolute must simply transcend self-consciousness. This is one of the well-known theses of Mr. Bradley.
In answer, one must point out that our Absolute, as inclusive Will and Experience, must at all events include the whole of the content which any finite self-consciousness involves, and must, at least in so far, possess self-conscious elements or factors in order even to transcend them. What I am conscious of when I am aware of myself, that at the least is a moment in the whole consciousness of the Absolute; and so much is involved in our general theory of the positive inclusion of all finite facts in the unity of the supreme consciousness of the Absolute.
But one cannot pause here. The unity of the Absolute Moment is, as we have seen, a fact not merely ​immediate, and, on the other hand, not merely inclusive of whatever mediate and interrelated contents there are in the world; but it is also a unity of consciousness determined by its reference to the whole process that we express in finite mediations. The Absolute Experience knows — or, if you please to use the familiar metaphor, sees — the perfect fulfilment of the absolute system of thought or ideas. This fulfilment, first of all, constitutes what the Absolute as such sees, and, save by seeing this, the Absolute is no Absolute, no Experience, no seeing of truth, at all. Now this seeing, this consciousness, of ideas — of the truth — as fulfilled in the immediate data or contents of the Absolute Experience, is a seeing of a contrast, namely, of the contrast between the world of thought (itself a fashion of consciousness) and the world of facts, or data. Now these two aspects of the Absolute are seen as contrasted and yet as essentially related fashions of consciousness, contrasted as a thinking Self and a Self experiencing data. The Absolute sees these as fulfilling the one the other; since the thought, without the data, would be empty, the data, except in view of the thought, would be meaningless. Moreover, the thought, even in thinking of the data, essentially thinks of its own fulfilment, and so of the conscious aspect that beholds the fulfilment; so that the Absolute as the Seer of thought fulfilled, and the Absolute as the Thinker whose ideas refer to and aim at this very seeing or insight itself, together again constitute two conscious and contrasted aspects of the Absolute Unity, the Thinker and the Seer, as we might metaphorically ​name them, and the relations of these two are again the relations of two that are contrasted as mutually related Selves. So far, we have what may be called a trinity of Selves (if one is fond of the traditional but, to my mind, essentially trivial amusement of counting the “persons” in the Absolute). But now if this organism of interrelated Selves is afresh viewed with relation to what we have called the Absolute Will, we have a further function whereby the Absolute as Knower (viz., as Thinker, as Experiencer of the data that fulfil the ideas, and as Seer of the fulfilment) is consciously contrasted with the Absolute as Will, or as Love. For the Absolute as Knower knows the Absolute Will as the determining factor merely, whereby the world of the Knower himself gets its wholeness, and so its unity; while the Absolute Will is attentive to precisely such arrest of the “unreal possibilities” of our former account — to precisely such wholeness of the divine Experience — as shall individuate, and so complete, the data which are experienced, and the world wherein the Thinker conceives, and the Seer views, the fulfilment of the Absolute Knowledge in the data which are experienced.
Here, if you will, are four contrasting aspects or functions whose presence, whose contrast, whose relation, whose unity, appears to be essential to the Absolute. I say “if you will,” because at least these contrasts appear, while our mere enumeration pretends neither to completeness nor to absoluteness. These are conscious functions. They are not finite functions. The unity of the Absolute is not merely ​above but in their relationship, their contrast, and their mutual implication. I make nothing of the number four. One might prefer to count them as two or as three, or, for all that I can see, as more than four functions, by laying especial stress upon one or another of various possible contrasts, or by uniting two or more under one name. As I say, I care nothing for a mere count of the “persons of the Godhead.” Three or twenty, — it matters little or nothing to philosophy. But the essential thing is, that, whenever you count, at least the essential facts involved in this enumeration of contrasts appear, in some form, to exist, however many units you choose to regard it as convenient to distinguish. Now, since these contrasting and mutually implicated conscious functions exist, it seems at least fair to say that any one of these functions consciously finds in the others, or in any other you please, its own contrasting other Self, namely, that without which it is not what it is, while the other is still, as aspect, distinct from it. In this sense, one can then say, the Absolute Unity of Consciousness contains, involves, includes, not merely finite types of self-consciousness, not merely finite contrasts of Self and Other, but the contrasts and the consciousness of its own being as Thinker, Experiencer, Seer, and as Love, or Will, and all of these as essentially interrelated aspects of itself as Unity. In this, which I take to be the only defensible sense of the doctrine, I regard the Absolute Unity as essentially inclusive of various interrelated forms of Absolute Self-Consciousness. The Unity transcends these forms ​only in so far as it is meanwhile constituted by and through them. And this is why, with all my indebtedness to Mr. Bradley’s discussions of the Absolute, I am unable to view the categories of self-consciousness as “mere appearance,” or to regard them as “lost,” or “absorbed” or “transformed” into something unspeakably other than they are, as soon as one passes to the absolute point of view.
The Absolute, then, in the only logically possible sense of the term, is through and through pervaded by self-consciousness. That is, the Absolute Unity is the unity of a variety of mutually interrelated and interpenetrating conscious functions, which, while contrasted, essentially refer to one another, and are fulfilled each in and through the others, so that they may well be called, by virtue of the contrast, conscious Selves, each being conscious that the other Selves, his Divine fellows, are in essence but himself fulfilled and wholly expressed. Thus, and thus only, can the Absolute be conscious of himself. To be sure, it would be vain to reduce this unity in variety to that bare “identity of Subject and Object” in terms of which an older and highly abstract theory was accustomed to define the sort of self-consciousness that Herbart, in a famous discussion, so easily reduced to absurdity, and that Fichte viewed as the goal of an endless process, or, in other words, as an impossibility. Concrete self-consciousness involves contrasts. But my present thesis is, that such contrasts are not inconsistent with the unity of even an Absolute Consciousness. ​
V THE ABSOLUTE AND THE FINITE INDIVIDUAL
The Absolute, then, possesses a logically complete form of self-consciousness. And the Absolute, as we have seen, is an Individual, whose life is known as the attentively selected fulfilment of its ideas, a fulfilment such that “no other” is admitted as genuinely possible. That selection of the possessed goal is, as we have seen, an absolutely free fact, and a fact of Will. It is free, because nothing in the Absolute Thought, as such, — unless, if you please, the very idea of free perfection, as such, — determines this fact of selection. But the freely selected goal is no single experience. It fulfils the whole system of ideas. It is therefore as full as the whole richness of life. The whole world of concrete facts belongs to it. Whatever is, is so far, then, an object of the one Divine Will, and helps to fulfil that Will. Therefore, as naturally follows, every fact in the world has, amidst all the necessity of its finitude, an element both of uniqueness and of contingency about it, — an element of contingency, because it is there to fulfil a free Will; an element of uniqueness, because it is a constituent in a single and unique integral Whole. This element in every finite fact is an element that no thought can predict. We express this when we say that every fact in the world is an individual fact, which cannot have its whole nature expressed in universal, that is, ideal terms. ​
Individuality, contingency, freedom, — these, as we have seen, are profoundly interrelated categories. Necessity concerns the finite interrelationships of thought — the universal, the finite links that tie fact to fact, the definable laws of being. The individual fact fulfils ideas, but is never wholly defined by them; embodies universals, but never can be analysed into them; conforms to law, but can never be wholly explained by law. What it is, ideas more or less fully tell us, just in so far as it has a universal nature. But no ideas ever tell us what constitutes it this individual object. So far, older theories of the individual have gone, when they defined the individual as the brute fact of sense. But our theory of the individual has gone still further. We have seen that mere immediacy of experience, the mere fact of sense as such, is not yet enough to constitute individuality. The individual is not merely this, but such a this that its place can be taken by “no other.” And, as such, the individual this, as we have seen, thus exists only as the object of an exclusive interest, and not merely as the object of a defining thought, or as the immediate datum of experience. But, as an object of an exclusive interest, the true individual of the ultimate real world is a fact that expresses the free Interest, or Love, of the Absolute as Will. A true individual, as such, is therefore itself a free fact. Its existence is not determined by the ideas that it embodies, nor even by the prior constitution of a fatal world of immediate experience. So far as these facts are concerned, many other data might have filled the place of this ​individual. This individual is what it is, in order that the exclusive interest of the Absolute in just this world of fact might find a free expression. The individual, then, is contingent. It need not be, but is. “But all this,” one may say, “applies to the whole world of fact as One Individual, and to each fact only as this part of the Individual Whole, but not to any finite fact as such. Surely the whole determines the parts. This world of fact, as a whole, exists as this contingent and free fulfilment of the Absolute Thought, in a way that expresses the Absolute Will. But any one fact — say, this atom, this star, this man — is, as fact, determined by the one Absolute Will. At a stroke the Eternal World is finished. There is one Individual, and that is the Whole. The parts are predestined by the Whole. Each part is determined. ‘Only One is free, and that is Zeus.’”
I reply with a question: Why so? Why not view the Individual Whole as a whole of many related but not therefore mutually determined individuals? Why is not that at least possible? Do you say that one system of Thought, one ideal unity of universal Ideas, or Laws, is by our hypothesis to be fulfilled, and that therefore the individual fulfilment can only be such that it realises the very system of laws in this system of facts, where the Whole is contingent, but the parts are predetermined by the unity of the system? Then I answer you, first, by instances. When I am to fill a space with matter, I have to do it so that whatever individual whole of matter fills that space shall conform to the system of the universal geometrical laws ​of space; but I am still free to fill each part of that space by whatever individual bodies I please, independently of the filling of the rest of the space. If one conceives that the universal laws, such as the law of gravitation, are to predetermine the movement of whatever individual collection of material masses happens to be found in the material world, still there is in the unity of that law nothing that predetermines what bodies shall exist at all, or what system of bodies, as a collection of individuals, shall fulfil the law. The bodies, when once existent, must conform, by hypothesis, to the law — must exemplify it. But the individual whole which is to exemplify the law may be composed of members that, as to their mere existence, are separate individuals, equally and mutually contingent, so that neither the law nor the other individual bodies predetermine that any one individual body amongst those that are to conform to the law must exist. Here are cases where a system of ideas may be conceived as fulfilled by and in a contingent whole whose parts are also contingent, both with respect to one another, and with respect to the system of ideas that, taken singly and together, they are to fulfil in an individual case. Why might not our world of facts be of this sort, — an individual whole of mutually contingent parts, conforming to law in whole and in part, embodying universals, fulfilling ideas, yet with freedom not only for the whole but also for the parts? Why might not the Absolute Will be a complex of many wills in one unity of consciousness, and so its object be an Individual consisting of individuals, all expressive of ​law, but all still mutually free with a freedom that is a part of the freedom of the Whole?
It is, then, possible that the selection of an individual whole should at a stroke determine the individual parts, or that, on the other hand, an individual whole should consist of mutually contingent individuals. The conditions that determine whether the one or the other of these logical possibilities shall be realised are not difficult to state. All depends upon the nature of the system of ideas that is to be realised. In any system of ideas, in advance of realisation the ideas may be of objects which stand to each other in relations that admit of no ambiguity as to their particular expressions. Relationships of this kind are very familiar. If in the world of ideas a is a quantity, and b another quantity equal to a, no ambiguity of any sort besets the relationship. In that case, any individual embodiment of this system of ideas in actual quantities — for example, A and B — will be such that I am free to choose only one of the two quantities, the other then being predetermined. On the other hand, in the most exact sciences, nothing is more common than cases of relationships which are not inexact, but which are in one sense ambiguous. Notoriously, any quantity a has two square roots, three cube roots, etc. If, then, I know that b is the square root of a, an individual embodiment of this simple system of ideas is not such that the determination of one object A in an individual embodiment predetermines absolutely the other individual. In this case, two alternatives are left open; and when I exemplify the system by ​the individual quantity A, B is free to be either one of the two square roots of A. The n different roots of an algebraic equation of the nth degree illustrate a still more complex instance of this sort of ambiguity. In general, let us suppose a system of various ideas, a, b, c, d, e, etc. Let us suppose certain relationships, r, r' r'', etc., so that I know in advance that a stands to b in relation r, b to c in relation r', c to d in relation r'' , etc. Then each one of these relations may be, as to its logical definition, perfectly exact, yet each one of them may be such that if the first member is determined, two, three, or an indefinite number of possibilities may be permissible in the determination of the remaining number. In other words, the relation may be such that the relation r permits the equation which would express it to have two, three, or an indefinite number of roots. In such cases, the system of ideas would be such that when I undertook to give it individual embodiment, having first chosen the individual embodiment A of one of the ideas, I should still be able, without inconsistency, to choose from a considerable number of possibilities in defining B, and from still a new list of possibilities in defining C, and so on. And all this ambiguity, or rather multiplicity, this freedom, would not mean that my relationships were necessarily inexactly conceived. The conception of each, in its kind, might be rigidly exact, just as there is no ambiguity of a logically objectionable character in the definition of a root of an algebraic equation, although such a definition leaves it necessarily ambiguous which one of several roots we shall in a given ​instance choose as our example of the class, in case of any given equation.
Now, it needs no argument to show that what we usually call in the empirical world Moral Relationships — that is, precisely the relationships which we conceive as existing amongst such ethical Selves as we have been defining — are to be conceived as of precisely such ambiguous character, no matter how exactly they may be defined. Here we speak not alone of metaphysical truth, but also of every-day fact. If we say that A and B are men, and are legal equals with respect to some form of social activity, we mean that what A does cannot wholly predetermine in the eyes of the law what B shall do in return; and that, too, however exact their relationships are, so long as they still remain quite equal. If, for instance, A and B are voters upon the same issues, and are equals as voters, that means that when A votes in a given way, B is left free by the relationship in question to vote in any one of several possible ways, as the case may determine, while remaining all the time the equal fellow-voter with A. Just so, when A speaks to B, B as his equal either may or may not speak to A in return; and if A makes a given proposal to B, B may or may not consent. The question, in all these cases, is not yet of any metaphysical freedom, but only of the nature of an ordinarily recognised relationship. The preservation of the equality, as a relationship, demands, within limits, the indetermination of the acts of one of the two equals by the acts of the other. The relation may be preserved, despite ​the indetermination, in the midst of a great variety of possible responses made by B to A. In still closer relations, indetermination yet remains a feature of the ordinary world of moral relationships. For instance, if the relationship between A and B be defined thus: that A asks B a direct question, and that B gives what answer he can, then, to speak metaphorically, the equation expressing this relationship admits of three roots. B may say “Yes,” or may say “No,” or may express uncertainty. If uncertainty is excluded as being no answer, two roots of the equation still remain. In this way, quite apart from any question of metaphysical free-will, we may define the relationships of the moral world as such that, in the most exact of these relationships, any individual case that is capable of being taken as one of the terms of such a relationship does not in general determine, without ambiguity, the other term of the relationship, but in general leaves open not merely two or three, but even an indefinite number of possible other terms. Preserve the integrity of the relationship, choose your individual embodiment of one of its terms, and you are still free to choose one of several, often of many, — in some cases an infinite number of individual embodiments of the other terms. It follows, then, from the nature of moral relationships, such as in their highest form are exemplified by the relationship of Selves, that if there is to be a universe in which they are found, not one simple act of free choice, but an act involving many relatively independent acts, is involved in the individuation of such a world, — if the fore​going account of the relation of choice to individual fact is to be maintained. For no one simple free act suffices, but many such acts are needed, in order to account logically for the individuation actually present in any such world.
But now let us take one step further. Let us make the moral relationships that we are to consider explicitly relationships amongst Selves of the type that we have been defining. Let A be one of these Selves; a conscious life, defined in its unity by its relation to some one ideal. Let B be another Self in the same world with A. From A’s point of view, from B’s point of view, and from the absolute point of view, these two lives are, first, distinct. They are, to be sure, as masses of fact, present in the unity of the Absolute Consciousness. But they themselves are more than mere masses of fact, that is, more than mere data. Each is metaphysically an individual, in so far as his life is the object of an exclusive interest, which we first define as the exclusive interest whereby the Absolute individuates this life, this portion of the world of fact. These two exclusive interests are, even in and for the absolute point of view, not the same. And so far we have variety, at all events, of will in the Absolute. Now, as we have before seen, from the point of view of A or of B, there exists a self-consciously individuating will, an exclusive interest in his life, as realising his ideal, or as struggling towards it. This will and self-consciousness in A is inevitably a part of the Absolute Will and Self-Consciousness, by virtue of the very unity of consciousness upon which our whole ​view depends. The Absolute, then, individuates the lives of A and B by virtue of interests, of forms of will and of self-consciousness, which are different for A and for B, and which, in case of each of them, are such as to include, in one interest, A’s will, in the other interest, B’s will. Our question now is, whether these two forms of will are so related to one another and to the Absolute Will in its wholeness, that an Absolute Will such as is expressed in the world which contains A is necessarily at once expressed in a world which contains B also, or whether the Absolute Will might be expressed in A without necessarily being expressed in a world which, on that sole account, must contain B precisely as he now is. In other words, we ask whether A and B, who by hypothesis are actually existent as individuals, are as such predetermined by any one act whereby the Absolute should choose to individuate this whole present world of fact, or whether, on the other hand, the Absolute in choosing A is in so far left free as to the choice of B, and vice versa.
Our answer is already suggested in part by the consideration of the general nature of all moral relationships. Suppose A and B to be in so far predetermined by the system of the absolute ideas, that some moral relationship — that of equal, of fellow-citizen, of friend, of enemy, of lover, of questioner and answerer, or of any other moral nature, vague or exact — is to exist between them, at any point in their lives. Then, whatever this relation may be, and however sharply it may be supposed to be defined, still, so long as it is a moral relationship, it is such that ​if you give to one of its terms any value otherwise possible, that is, any individual embodiment, the other term is not thereby predetermined. If one of these persons were conceived merely as the embodiment of the other’s ideals, he would be fact of that other person’s life. But, by hypothesis, the ideal or form of will embodied in A is distinct from that embodied in B; A is not what B wishes him to be, merely as such, nor is B what A wishes him to be, merely as such. For what the Absolute wills in A is at least, so far, distinct from what the Absolute wills in B. The only possible relations between these two persons in the moral world would thus be either total independence, so that neither in the least determined anything in the other’s life, or, if the relations were definite, they would have to be of the types that admit many roots, — to use our former metaphor. And so the Absolute Will, in so far as it received individual embodiment in A, would stand in an ideally definable relationship to the will expressed in B, such that any one of various individuals of the type of B would be permitted to exist, when A once existed, and without conflict with the nature of this relationship. In other words, in choosing A, the Absolute would not, logically speaking, have yet chosen B, but only one of several individuals, any one of whom might have satisfied equally well the ideal relationship between A and B. But, now, what holds of the relationship between A and B would hold also of the relationship of either, or of both, to all definable other individual Selves in the universe. Of all these individual Selves we should alike say, according to our hypothesis, the ​following things: (1) Their lives, as data, are all present in the unity of the Absolute Consciousness; (2) their wills, as personal choices of ideals, are included within a corresponding variety of ideals or forms of will, which together make up the Will of the Absolute, so far as it relates to the moral world; (3) their relations are such that whatever any one of them, A, is, neither the fact of his existence nor his character as an embodiment of the Absolute Will predetermines unambiguously the nature or contents of any other individual life, B. In consequence, we may now without question say that the one act of absolute choice which is embodied in this world that contains the individuals A, B, C, etc., does as fact actually include many mutually contingent, that is, mutually underdetermined, acts of choice, each of which is identical with that mode of will which gets expressed in the life of an individual, and which as a fact includes his own personal self-conscious will. In other words, not merely is the Absolute Will, as expressed in the life and personality of A, distinct from those forms of the Absolute Will that are expressed in other individuals; but this distinction is such that the Absolute Will might be embodied definitely in all the other individuals of the world, and the absolute ideas and their system might predetermine the precise nature of the moral relation in which A is to stand to the rest of the world, and yet A might be left free to be any one of a very large number of individuals, until we conceive the Absolute Free-Will completed by a determinate act expressing itself in the individuality of A, inclusive of the individual ​self-conscious will of the finite person A himself, and, as such, free from all the rest of the universe of the Absolute Choice. In this way, without for one moment destroying the unity of our Absolute, without at any moment interfering with the purely theoretical considerations that have forced us to define this unity, we should have defined the personal or individuating will of A as free, as an individual will, and as an integral part of the Divine Will. This individuating will of A we should have defined as expressed in his own conscious will, precisely as he himself views it when he knows himself as this moral being. And thus the foregoing theses would have received, for our present purposes, their relatively sufficient vindication. The moral individual can say, “I am free,” and “I am part of the Divine Will.” The antinomy is solved.
VI THE TEMPORAL RELATIONS OF THE INDIVIDUAL
It remains here to say a few things as to the temporal relations of the finite individual thus defined. Our general theory of reality has implied the thesis that all temporal sequences are included in the unity of the Absolute Moment. This is not the place for a closer study of the metaphysics of the time-process. It is enough here to point out that the act of choice expressed in the moral, or individuating, will of any finite person is neither to be identified with any of the particular acts of our passing lives, nor, in the ​case of any finite individual, to be abstractly divorced from these acts, or to be conceived merely as a transcendent and non-temporal act, occurring, as it were, in another world; for instance, in a prenatal life. From my point of view, the individuating will of any person, as this person, is expressed, from moment to moment, in his more or less conscious intention to view his life as a struggle towards, and consequently as in contrast with, his ideal goal. Neither this goal, nor this intention, in order to be self-conscious, need be defined in abstract terms. It is not necessary to be a philosopher in order to be a person; and often enough, as human nature goes, abstract ideas may be permitted so much to stand in the way of concrete devotion, that a given individual may appear all the more doubtfully to be a person by virtue of the fact that he has let himself become a philosopher. He is not a person, who has abstractly said: “Thus and thus I define my ideal, and thus and thus I define the contrast between my experience and my goal.” He is a person, an individual in the foregoing sense, as self-conscious moral agent, who is aware, however vaguely, that some one aim illumines his life, gives it wholeness as a struggle through whatever difficulties, and at the same time lies so far beyond his reach that no lucky stroke of human fortune could make him say, “My soul hath here found her rest so absolute,” or, “Nothing else is worthy of me; there is nothing else that I could do or be that would fulfil me better.” All these things, to be sure, a finite individual might say, as Othello said one of them, in a moment of transient illusion. But as the ​dying Othello conceived of a task yet to be done, which fortune forbade him to engage in, namely, the task of doing strict justice to his illusions and to their causes, so, in general, the moral person is such, in our life, because his goal is beyond, and obstacles lie between. He may despair, as profoundly as he pleases, of attaining his goal. Suicide, in such despair, only emphasises, in a somewhat abrupt fashion, the contrast between the real and the ideal self, and so the genuineness of the moral personality. In such cases the contrast-effect is grim, but the moral facts are none the less evident.
Now particular acts, inspired by such an ideal, are, in so far, metaphysically considered, the expression, and so, from the absolute point of view, the deeds, of the moral individual. That is, from the absolute point of view, the facts of experience, as individuated from the point of view of this personal will, include the contents of such temporal acts as express this will. To say this, is to prejudge in no wise the psychological point of view with regard to the predetermination, in the physical sense, of the temporal sequence of such acts. That, the world being what it is, temporal observers of phenomena are able to discover natural laws of the sequence of phenomena is a matter that has nothing whatever to do with either the metaphysical constitution or the ethical significance of the world. Metaphysically speaking, the whole world is there to express what we have called the Divine Will. And the Divine Will, as metaphysical fact, includes the self-conscious and free will of the moral individual. Both these wills, ​as they are in their true nature, are facts of the eternal world, whereby I mean nothing transcendent of the totality of experience, and nothing essentially remote from this world, but merely the world as viewed in the unity of the Eternal Moment — the absolute Now. This Eternal Instant includes temporal processes, although we can never adequately conceive either its facts or its constitution in terms of merely temporal sequence. That is, from the absolute point of view, all temporal sequences are included in, and transcended by, some higher form of consciousness, into whose nature we have not further here to inquire. On the other hand, all temporal sequences given in finite experience are fragmentary facts from the midst of the unity of the One Moment. Ethically considered, the temporal sequences have a significance. In case of persons, this ethical significance comes into sight when we consider the relation of those particular processes which we call acts to the goal in the eternal world toward which they tend. From this point of view, we must rightly call these acts temporal and partial expressions of the freedom (and now of the individual freedom) which is expressed in those goals, and in the whole individual lives that strive towards them. We therefore say to the moral individual: “This your act, in so far as you meant it, that is, in so far as it expressed your striving toward your goal, is an embodiment of your freedom, and, in so far, nobody in the whole universe of God besides yourself is responsible for it, is expressed in it, or is to be judged for it. In so far, your acts show what you are. ​Viewed with reference to your goal, they are part of you. In the long run, what they are, you are; and no will besides your own, no Divine choice beyond yourself, determines what, in the most individual aspect of your being, you are.” It follows, of course, that we can say all this only to the moral individual as such, and not to every chance empirical creature who happens to assume human shape, unless we presuppose him to be a true Self.
On the other hand, it is a wholly different thing to view the individual psychologically. Here one studies, not at all the constitution of the real world as such, that is, of the eternal world as eternal, of the Absolute Moment in its unity, but the sequences of facts in fragmentary regions of temporal experience. Of these, one studies, not the significance, but the sequence and the phenomenal physical relationships. These are matters of natural history. One explains them as one can. For reasons that belong not here, one explains them only in so far as one detects uniformities of sequence in them, and one has every reason to say that, in so far as one views them in the light of empirical science, one can admit no freedom — that is, here, no capriciousness of sequence — as occurring in their phenomenal manifestations. But the moral freedom of the eternal world does not mean the capricious sequence of the temporal, at least as any capriciousness that could be recognised from the point of view of a successful empirical science. The empirical psychologist therefore knows nothing about freedom, as such, and those who seek for psychological proofs for the freedom of ​the will comprehend neither psychology nor freedom. Psychology deals, not with the moral Self, but with the empirical creature called a man, viewed merely as he chances to be.
Meanwhile, the freedom of the moral individual in the moral world is, by virtue both of its metaphysical relationships and of the requirements of a moral order, a distinctly limited freedom. This it is; this it ought to be. This it is, since the moral individual stands in moral relationships. From the absolute point of view, these, as indicated above, are expressible in terms of ideas of relationship. These ideas, viewed as relational equations, permit any one moral individual, when others are supposed to be determinate, to be one of many — possibly, of infinitely numerous — abstractly possible individuals. But the possibilities are still limited by the nature of the ideas. There may be an infinite number of ways in which the individual A could be represented, in his place in the moral world, by other individuals, had A chosen to be other than he is. But on the other hand, A’s moral relationships make certain that there is an infinite number of abstractly possible individuals whom A was not free to be, in view of his determinate place in the moral order. And the relation of A to the rest is itself determined by the consistency of the ideal divine plan, by what has been called the Divine Wisdom, which is neither God’s choice nor A’s. In his empirical life, this limitation of the possibilities for A will appear, in relatively significant form, and apart from psychological considerations, as the fact that A is in the most complex fashion dependent ​upon his fellows, not only in his experiences, but in his moral opportunities, in his place as a moral agent; while he, in turn, will appear as limiting by his deeds the moral opportunities of others. That one moral agent can do not merely good but moral harm to another moral agent, can render the other’s freedom of less scope and value, is not only an empirical fact, but (since the opportunity to do good which is implied in this very dependence is the basis of moral effectiveness) this very correlative power to do real mischief to other free-agents is an essential part of the constitution of the moral world. In view of this, I consider it not only vain but dangerous to regard the moral individual A as having such independence of B that one has a right to call him “infinite,” — in the eternal world, any more than in the temporal. A world of so-called “infinite” free moral agents is, at best, a polytheistic world. At worst, it threatens, as I before said, to prove no “City of God,” but something much more diabolical. The free-agents of a moral world are free only in so far as their essential moral relations ideally leave them free. They have their place and must stay in it. They have their individuality and must subordinate it. They can do one another moral mischief, and the sufferer from such mischief proves the limitations, not merely of finite experience, but of moral individuality. ​
VII THE IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL
But now as to one remaining aspect of the moral individual’s place in the order of the universe. As we empirically know this individual, he is found subject, as to the sequence of his experience, to countless caprices of fortune, amongst which the most generally noteworthy is the seemingly quite arbitrary physical accident of death. For while death, as we see it, is a fact of considerable cosmological importance, it is of almost no discoverable and essential moral significance. Hence, from the point of view of the moral Ego, it has to be called an arbitrary chance. Necessary and intelligible enough as a natural phenomenon, and so, when cosmologically viewed, as rational an event as is any other phenomenon of nature, death stubbornly refuses to have any constant relation to that ideal which gives the whole meaning to the life of an individual Ego; it simply seems, either abruptly or, in case of its slow approach, gradually, to interrupt the entire process that was to fulfil that ideal. But when the process is interrupted, the Ego of which we have been speaking vanishes from manifestation in so much of concrete experience as is within our direct human ken. The question arises: Is this seeming interruption the true temporal end of the Ego? If so, of course the individual Ego remains with its ideal unfulfilled, with its possibilities unrealised. For in this life the finite Ego is only a seeker of its goal, as a knight of his quest. Yet, by ​our foregoing hypothesis, the goal of the Ego, its life-ideal, is one of God’s ideals, actual or genuine; and for God there are no genuine possibilities unfulfilled; no true ideas that hover above reality as bare possibilities. God’s ideas are fulfilled in his experience. The inevitable result seems to be, that, just in so far as the moral Ego really is unfulfilled in this life, there is another finite life in the universe, consciously continuous with this one, which, when taken together with this one, consciously reaches the here unattainable goal of this individual moral Ego, so that, in the universe, the individual is perfected in his own kind. To be sure, if his life-ideal has its essentially anarchical or diabolical aspect, this implies that this Ego may, as a moral being, reach the perfection of its own kind in the form of a relatively lost or morally bankrupt Ego; and I see no reason to deny that numerous individuals, freely attending to the ideal which rationally involves their own damnation, attain, in their special types of relative perfection, to their chosen goal. But the study of the problem of Evil belongs not here. Moreover, as I said before, even the lost, if they exist, cannot be utterly devoid of goodness, but are only relatively lost. Enough, however: the individual’s life is a process of experience that means the aim of attaining his life-ideal. If this aim is one of God’s aims, — as it is, — this aim does not remain, from an absolute point of view, a barely possible ideal. There is an experience, and a finite experience, which fulfils this aim, and which involves, then, the perfection of just this individual Ego after his own kind. And this experience is this individual ​man’s own experience, and is God’s only in so far as it is this man’s experience. This attainment of the ideal of one’s life is a concrete, a conscious attainment. It does not occur in our earthly experience.
Yet here one meets with a paradox. Perfection after my own kind, oneness with the ideal of my life, — this, we say, I must attain. I cannot attain it in this life. I must then have some other life. But what life? An endless one? An endless series of strivings toward the goal must be ahead of me? So the matter seems, if I observe merely the before-mentioned fact, that, from my present point of view, I cannot conceive of any series of deeds that would end in making me finally and utterly one with my individual goal. For, as a being who lives in time, it is of the essence of me to set my ideal beyond any once-reached point in time. I cannot conceive myself as conscious of my last moral act, as my last, any more than I can conceive the end of time. On the other hand, my goal is, from God’s point of view, attained. Viewed in my wholeness, as God eternally views my life, my experience appears, not merely as a temporal series, but as perfected. It is eternally done. As temporal being I may then, as it seems, say: “I shall attain my goal.” But, again, in time? Ah then, to be sure, there will come somewhere my last temporal moment. Thus I am in a strait between two. If I am to be perfected in my own kind, — as I must be, so surely as God is, — then there seemingly lies ahead of me the temporal fulfilment of my life, the last moment of my process towards my perfection. On the other hand, if there is ahead of me ​such a last moment, it must be a last moment, not of a nature-process, but of a moral Ego. But a temporal moral Ego that still says: “Now I am fulfilled; there is no more beyond; time ends for me,” — it seems a contradiction in terms.
The traditional view of immortality is subject to just this paradox. Its essence is, to say that the just in heaven are perfected, that the lost in hell are fixed in an eternal state. This view is so far, barring its allegorical form, strictly philosophical. On the other hand, tradition tries to conceive this perfected state as one in which something temporal happens. But the temporal happening conflicts with the perfection. An atrocious tautology of irrational torment emphasises ever afresh to the damned the now absolutely trite brute fact that they are damned. The fact at once loses all rational significance when thus repeated. One has to add an endless, ugly, and useless misery, in order to keep the now established and ancient fact of damnation temporally and sensuously alive. The effect of the doctrine is, so far, grewsome but grotesque. Yet the perfection of the saints, when you view that as a temporal affair, is obviously conceived in an equally unreal form. What now happens? The individual saint knows no change, progresses to no new ideal, survives in an endlessly delicious and insignificant tautology of bliss and of thanksgiving. Nothing happens, but all goes on and on forever.
I hasten to add that tradition is often aware that all these things are but symbols of an experience that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, and that it hath not ​entered in the heart of man to conceive. I also hasten to point out that the lesson of all this is, that our temporal categories are wholly inadequate to express the ultimate facts of an eternal life. To the restless questions of a human consciousness whose present temporal form is wholly inadequate to its moral ideals, philosophy must reply simply thus: When you want immortality, you want what rationally means simply that this moral individual, at home as he is in God’s world, does not remain fragmentarily expressed, as on earth he is expressed, in a life of broken chance. You want to know that somewhere he — this individual, he himself and not another — knows himself as fulfilled after his own kind; as possessed of a life that, in its wholeness, earthly and superhuman, is adequate to his ideal. Now, that this is the case is just what tradition has asserted in its doctrine of the final perfection of the just and of the unjust, each after his own freely chosen kind. Philosophy here supports tradition. This is a moral world. All moral battles get fought out. All quests are fulfilled. The goal — yes, your individual goal — is by you yourself attained in the eternal life. You yourself, and not merely another, consciously know in the eternal world the attainment of that goal. But how? Where? When? To this philosophy at once answers: The temporal as well as the spatial world is but a fragment of the complete experience; your fulfilment will never come in time; and how your eternal experience of your perfection is individually realised by you, is a question which cannot be answered, in so far as you remain on this shoal of time. ​
PART V REPLIES TO CRITICISMS
For obvious reasons, the foregoing discussion has been planned with constant reference to the criticisms of Professor Howison, contained in his contribution to the original discussion before the Philosophical Union. My difference with Professor Howison appears the most fundamental amongst those developed during that discussion; and yet, despite the plainness of speech in some of the foregoing incidental replies, I have everywhere borne in mind the hope of reconciliation expressed at the outset of this supplementary paper. Nor have I desired to make my criticisms merely destructive. Professor Howison appears, at the outset of his argument, as one who deliberately adopts idealistic principles. If, as I have said, his actual doctrine takes rather the form of an Ethical Realism, that is because, to his mind, the ethical relationships amongst individuals, while existing solely for the sake of the individual minds themselves, appear to him, as he expresses himself, to be irreducible to the contents in any one mind, or to any other element definable in terms of any single unity of consciousness. In consequence, ​if we take Professor Howison as he expresses himself, we find the constitution of the moral world, according to him, essentially resembling the constitution ascribed by realists to “things in themselves,” existent apart from the processes, the organisation, or the contents of any mind. On the other hand, from Professor Howison’s point of view, my own thesis inevitably reduces the constitution of the moral world to a collection of contents, presented merely as contents in the unity of the Absolute Experience. And Professor Howison not unjustly insists that such a thesis, if viewed as the whole of my doctrine, would deprive the moral world of elements essential to its genuine constitution. In reply, I have endeavoured to show that the development, and in fact the only consistent development, of my thesis introduces into the definition of the Absolute elements which render the definition of a moral world not only adequate and intelligible but inevitable; and that, too, without detriment to the absolute unity of this ultimately real Consciousness itself.
I PROFESSOR HOWISON, AND THE ANTINOMY OF THE MORAL WORLD
In view of the position that has thus been reached, I venture to return explicitly to the formal statement of the antinomy which was indicated in the Introduction of this supplementary paper, which was discussed substantially in its Second, Third, and Fourth Parts, ​and which, as I conceived the matter, was essentially solved, as I stated in passing, at the conclusion of the fifth section of the Fourth Part. This antinomy, when separated from the rest of the argument, runs substantially as follows:
| THESIS The entire world of truth, natural and ethical, must be present in the unity of a single Absolute Consciousness. The world of truth, for the reasons developed in Part First of this paper, must constitute an Organic Whole of Fact, realising ideas. Otherwise, there would be relations of ideas and facts which were real relations, and which yet transcended all consciousness. Such real relations, as transcendent “things in themselves,” prove to be meaningless. Hence the Thesis is established. | ANTITHESIS The constitution of the moral world demands a real Variety of Individuals, — such a variety as cannot be present in the unity of any single consciousness. Moral relations are relations of individuals, who are free as to their will, and independent both of one another and of any whole of reality to which they belong. Such independence implies mutual separateness, and forbids the free individuals to be the mere fulfilment, in a world of facts, of ideas of any one being. Hence the individuals cannot be contained in any single unity of consciousness; and the Antithesis is proved. |
The Thesis, as will be remembered, I maintain absolutely, and without alteration. The only new element in the present discussion is a development of the theory of the Organic Whole, that is, of the unity of the Absolute Consciousness; or, to use the language of the first paper, is a proof that the attribute of Omniscience implies other divine attributes. This development, distinctly predicted in the opening paper, is nothing but what so abstract a concept as that of ​Omniscience naturally demands. In this development, the actual constitution of the empirical unity of consciousness, as we human beings know it, has everywhere been taken into account. That the Absolute is an Absolute Experience, I still deliberately maintain. That even in order to be such an experience, it must involve other elements besides experience, that is, besides the mere presentation of data, or of immediate contents, is what has been shown, and what was very obviously implied in the original discussion. In other words, along with immediacy, there must be mediation; and what kind of mediation, has now been defined, — not with any pretence to exhaustiveness, but with an effort to give to the abstract considerations of the original paper something of the concreteness which was from the outset regarded as necessary for the completion of the theory, even in the most tentative statement. I submit, however, that my conception of the Absolute must be judged by its developments, as well as in the light of its original deduction. For such developments were predicted from the outset of the argument.
As to the Antithesis, on the contrary, I assert that it embodies a natural, and, in advance of analysis, an inevitable illusion, just in so far as it uses the true conception of moral freedom as a proof of the false separation of the individuals. This is the illusion that the category of Individuality is definable in terms of the segmentation of contents, and therefore implies such segmentation, be these contents empirical or ideal. I assert that two individuals need not ​be sundered as to the unity of consciousness which contains them; and that if they were so sundered, they would not thereby become individuals. The chasm that is to sunder an individual A from another B may be defined as you please. You may make this chasm a “thing in itself” or a matter of feeling, — an unintelligible presupposition or an object of what you define as a sentiment of “stainless allegiance.” In no whit are you helped by such devices. Chasms do not individuate. Feelings do not need chasms to make them rational. The principle of individuation is not the principle of the sundering or segmentation of contents, whether within a unity of consciousness or as a fact transcendent of such unity. The life of an individual A is individuated, and is kept from being confounded with the life of any other individual B, solely by the truth, if it be a truth, that the life of A, as presented system of contents, fulfils or meets an exclusive interest I, which is such that it declines to admit of more than one system or collection of facts as capable of furnishing it its desired fulfilment; while the life of B similarly meets an exclusive interest I', which is different from the exclusive interest I. That these two interests, or that the contents of these two lives, should be presented as contents to the unity of one experience, and possessed as interests by the Will which in its wholeness individuates the entire system of the world’s contents, does not in any wise militate against the individual distinctions, whatever they are, between A and B. Meanwhile, that these individuals should be not merely numerically different, but free, that is, ​in any respect mutually independent, or that they should be independent, in any respect, of the rest of the constitution of the Absolute Will, — this does not demand the segmentation of the interests I and I’ , as “things in themselves,” or as otherwise transcendent realities, from one another, or from the rest of the universe. Such freedom demands only, that in the individuation of the universe, as it is, the interests which are expressed in the other individual lives and facts of the world shall not, by virtue of the constitution of the world of ideas, absolutely predetermine how the interest I, as such, shall either formulate or express itself, and that the same relative independence shall hold of any other interest I’, such as gets expressed in the life of a free individual.
Herein, as asserted above, lies the essence of the solution of our antinomy. And I offer the solution, not merely as a polemic, but as a suggestion towards reconciliation. I see not why the ancient and to my mind rather superstitious objection to Idealism, which has received so skilful a formulation in Professor Howison’s discussion, should longer be regarded as any essential obstacle in the way of a rational philosophy.
My further answers to Professor Howison’s objections may now take a less irreconcilable tone than would otherwise be necessary. My argument is taxed with a certain “solipsistic” tendency. The ​essence of such an objection is the failure to comprehend that self-consciousness and the unity of consciousness are categories which inevitably transcend, while they certainly do not destroy, individuality. The unity of the world is first known to us in terms of knowledge. The world of the Will, as we first see it, is very rightly an individuated world, which appears full of conflict, of mutual independence, and of limitation. By moral Self, we mean, in the ordinary world, the individual as individuated by and through the relation of his will to the contents of his life. The individual is indeed not mere will, nor mere contents of life, but a life viewed in relation to, that is, as individuated by, the exclusive interest which is his characteristic individual will. If such an individual is considered as a knower, this view of the world naturally regards his knowledge as a sort of accident, or instrument, of his will. When such an individual Ego says: “My knowledge, completely developed, pursued to its ultimate consequences, is identical with the Absolute Knowledge,” his fellow-individuals, naturally observing that his will is not theirs, and that his individual life in no wise includes or can include their individual lives, are disposed, if they are unlearned, to make sport, — if they are philosophers, to interpose more ​technical but actually ungrounded objections. The individual’s knowledge, such objectors insist, is something that he carries perhaps in his head, perhaps as a mere organ of his immortal soul, perhaps as his reflection of the far-off Sun of divine insight. In any case, however, it is just his knowledge; and he is primarily a being with this life and this will, wholly incapable of including within either his life, or the knowledge that is so far a mere incident of such a life, either the knowledge or the life of anybody else. If he thinks that he does this, he is deluded into the vain fancy that he can absorb the whole universe into his head, can swallow all souls in his own capacious soul, or can live all lives while he lives his own! Professor Howison, as philosopher, is beyond the cruder forms of such polemic. He admits that our thesis need not mean that the world is absorbed into the narrow individual Ego as such. But he objects that, in that case, the individual, as such, is, in his turn, inevitably lost in the self-abnegating consciousness: “I am He.” But not thus are the alternatives exhausted. Knowledge is a form of self-consciousness. So also is self-conscious individuality. But the two, while in the closest and most organic relationship, are distinct, and secure their organic relationship by virtue of this very distinction. The finite knower, as such, is thinking of and conforming to the beyond, so long as he is finite knower. For herein lies his essence as knower. He lives in self-surrender, in seeking to understand what he possesses by discovering its relation to, its inclusion in, an ​organic whole from which it is inseparable. As knower, such a finite individual, if he were isolated from the whole, would be an absolute self-contradiction. What he discovers in every act of knowledge is, that, just in so far as he sees truth, he is not isolated nor sundered, by any chasm, from the truth that he sees. He learns, in the end, that his knowledge has no meaning, no existence, except as a moment in and of the Absolute Knowledge. Thus he discovers that the world of knowledge is, as a fact, absolutely one, despite whatever variety or apparent or relative sundering or finitude may exist within it, either as to its contents or as to the types of its organisation.
On the other hand, the moral individual, in whose life his own will is to be expressed, exists as expressing this will, and so as declining to confound himself with any other individual, and as incapable of absorbing other individuality into himself. His first view of his situation, in so far as he uses his knowledge merely as the instrument of his individuality, is therefore that he is sundered by impassable chasms from all other realities.
But if we once see that the unquestionable unity of the world of the knower, viewed as Absolute Knower, implies the very individuality by virtue of which the whole world is known as whole; that individuality, in a moral world, means a variety of forms of will, mutually and, although only relatively, yet very really independent, both as to their meaning and as to their expression; that the world of the will is not sundered from the world of know​ledge, but is merely another aspect of it; that the world of the various forms of will, expressed in the contents of finite life, is a world of Moral Individuals, as free as the moral order admits and demands; and, finally, that each individual, while possessing his ethical freedom, and expressing it in his life, is as knower an organic part, as will a particular will-form, and so, as complete individual, a moment, of that total Unity of consciousness whose will, whose thought, and whose life constitute the world, — if, I say, one faces these considerations, together, and in their whole meaning, the paradox vanishes. The unity of the world of knowledge is not “solipsistic,” in the sense in which that word was first used. There is, indeed, but one knowing Self, when we pass to the highest unity of the world of knowledge, or to what we have before called the Absolute as Knower. At the same time, even this very unity of the Absolute Knowledge implies, as we have seen, and contains an organic variety of interrelated selfhood, even when we confine ourselves to the categories of knowledge alone. On the other hand, the Absolute Self, as such, is not the finite individual, as such; and when, as knower, the individual identifies himself with the Absolute Knower, he does not do this in so far as he is this finite individual, but in so far as his knowledge is universally reasonable knowledge. Meanwhile, both the Absolute and the finite individual are true individuals. The Absolute, as individual, is One; the finite individuals, as such, are many. They are not confounded with one another. They do not slip as ​dewdrops into any sort of a shining sea. They are individuals, constitutive of an Individual. And the “City of God” is God, while its citizens are free and finite individuals. No finite individual possesses the wholeness, the grade of reality, which the Absolute possesses. But, on the other hand, the finite individuals are as real as the moral order requires or permits them to be.
II PROFESSOR MEZES, AND THE CONTENTS OF REALITY
While I have not hitherto expressly mentioned, in this new discussion, my two other critics, I have throughout borne in mind their statements, and have anticipated, in the course of this paper, most of what it would otherwise be necessary here to state in answer to their comments.
Professor Mezes offers two objections to the definition of the Absolute given in my first paper. Both of these objections refer to the inadequacy of the contents of the conception, so far as I explicitly defined these contents. In one sense, I accept both these objections, and enter a plea of “confession and avoidance.” My statement of my conception was intended to be abstract. I was not concerned with the question: What finite beings exist? but only with the question: What ultimate unity has the world of knowledge? Moreover, in my first paper I consciously avoided considering the relation of the moral world, as such, to the Absolute. Hence I did not ​point out how the unity of the eternal world is related to the significant temporal events of the moral world. Professor Mezes is, however, perfectly right in declaring that both the foregoing questions: What finite beings exist? and, What is the relation of the moral world to the Absolute? are questions of great importance for philosophy. He is right in observing that, since my discussion omitted the definite consideration of these problems, it is inadequate. I need make here only the general plea, in “avoidance,” that I did not profess that my discussion was adequate.
As to the particulars, however, of Professor Mezes’s objections, I have indeed a few observations to offer. Professor Mezes, in the first of his two general comments, expresses some curiosity as to how I should undertake to supplement my conception, so far as concerns the wealth and the “spirituality” of the Absolute Life. Whence, he asks, can I derive, on the basis of my argument, the more “spiritual” attributes of my Absolute? My natural reply is a question addressed to Professor Mezes: Whence does he himself derive the conception of the “spirituality” whose presence he misses from the conception of the Absolute so far as I have defined it? For him to answer my question will inevitably involve the answer to his own. One has somehow or other formed, upon the basis of one’s finite experience, thought, reflection, and will, an idea of types of life that are higher in the scale of spirituality than are other types of life. In consequence, one avers that the single finite individual is, as such, of less import ​than are many individuals taken together. Social life, as one sees, is richer than isolated life, — an organism of co-operating moral agents is worth more than is the private experience and aspiration of any lonely self. The fulness of spirituality is more dignified in grade of being than is a world where one finite thinker, “tucked away in a corner,” has his aspirations fulfilled, and where he and the abstract Absolute are together all in all. This, I say, is somehow known as a truth, to one in the position of Professor Mezes. How, otherwise, should his questions be formulated? Unless he somehow knows all this, he finds and states no lack, no difficulty, in my conception. But if he knows this, then what does his knowledge imply? He has an idea, and, by hypothesis, a valid idea, of the possible spirituality which, as he affirms, the Absolute of my conception lacks, so far as I have developed the conception. Unless this idea is known to Professor Mezes as valid, the objection fails. But if it is known as valid, then the needed supplement is furnished by the very meaning of the question. This idea, — this valid idea, — what relation has it to the Absolute as explicitly, although abstractly, defined by my original theory? As valid idea, it is one of the ideas that the Absolute finds fulfilled in his experience. Escape from this conclusion there is none for one who, like Professor Mezes, accepts my theory as far as it goes, and who then observes this lack as an obvious lack, and who, in doing so, asserts as valid this idea of a higher spiritual perfection than my statement had explicitly defined. I had not expressly mentioned, in my original paper, the special forms ​of spirituality which Professor Mezes chooses to mention. But in mentioning such forms, he himself at once defines their place in the unity of my conception, precisely in so far as he regards this ideal spirituality as something whose presence is needed in order to complete the perfection of the life of the Absolute.
Perhaps Professor Mezes may insist that his objection, as stated, is not in this way adequately met. For, as he states his case, “Nothing can be held to be a part of the inclusive experience of the Absolute until its existence is fully proven.” He admits, indeed, that “it is not the business of philosophy to prove the existence of individual facts,” but he adds that “it is the business of philosophy to establish the truth of such principles as are indispensable for proving the existence of any and every individual fact not directly observed.” With this latter statement I cannot at present adequately deal. I admit, of course, that philosophy is concerned with numerous relatively special “principles” which form no part of the present discussion of one most fundamental concept. On the other hand, I should not admit that philosophy can undertake to consider all the principles that would be “indispensable” in proving the existence of “any and every fact not directly observed,” including, for instance, the principles that would be needed to guide one in finding out how far what he reads in the newspapers about the battles in Cuba agrees with the “unobserved” occurrences in that unhappy and apparently mendacious island. Philosophy can as little take the place of common-sense as the latter can take the place of philosophy; and ​the “principles” which would be “indispensable” to one who either undertook to follow common-sense or to correct common-sense in all its daily dealings with “any and every individual fact not directly observed,” would far transcend the ken of any philosopher. But, of course, as to the first of these statements of Professor Mezes, namely, the statement that philosophy is not concerned “to prove the existence of individual facts,” as such, there will be no question. The two statements, however, raise a problem as to the sense in which a philosophy such as mine, in defining the life of the Absolute, has first to deal, either in “principle” or in detail, with the individual existence of this or of that finite fact. And the problem here deserves still a word of answer.
Any one of us, as individual, believes in many finite facts that are needed to give his life any meaning, and that lie, as such facts, beyond the range of his private experience. Now comes philosophy, and says: The world as a whole has meaning; the Absolute sees all valid ideas fulfilled. The finite individual retorts with his questions: “But is this absolute meaning my meaning, or is it so inclusive of my meaning that my ideas of finite objects, say, of my wife and children, of my neighbours, of human life in general, of the higher and lower in the spiritual realm, are sure, in certain definable types of cases, to represent finite facts beyond my private experience? Am I insured against finite illusions by the organisation of the Absolute? Or can the Absolute so fulfil its own system of ideas as merely to refute or to neglect or to defeat my ideas? Can my life be a dream and ​a cheat, although the Absolute Life is clear and sure? If this last may be the case, then what do I care for the Absolute? For then his truth is not what I call ‘spiritual.’ But if the Absolute’s organisation insures the truth of any and all finite ideas, merely in so far as somebody holds them, where is the distinction between truth and error? I demand, then, a guiding principle, whereby I can distinguish true from illusory types of finite ideas. And I demand this principle from philosophy as such, and decline to be merely sent back to the realm of common-sense.” Now the demand thus defined is indeed fair enough. And while our former abstract statement failed to furnish an explicit answer to this demand, it did indicate the criterion which I have just applied to the questions stated by Professor Mezes, and which serves, rightly applied, to meet all questions that can fairly be asked of the philosopher, and that are not directly practical problems about the mere plausibilities of the world of common-sense, viewed as such mere plausibilities.
The criterion in question is not hard to state. As finite being you can err, you can dream, you can suffer from illusions, you can go insane; in brief, your finite judgment is never infallible. Just in your fallibility lies, as I have shown in my above-cited chapter on “The Possibility of Error” (The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Chapter XI), one ground for the proof that the Absolute is, and is infallible. But now, when you err, you still form an idea of the beyond; and this idea really refers to, bears upon, and so belongs to, the world that includes the be​yond, and that still, in its totality, has aspects which, relatively speaking, refute and transcend your idea. How, upon our idealistic basis, is such finite error possible? I answer: Only by virtue of the fact that the world, which well knows and includes your idea, and which fulfils all valid ideas, fails to fulfil your idea just in so far as your finite idea is a part, a fragment, — a mere shred, it may be, — of a more inclusive and more significant total Idea, which in its wholeness transcends your idea, but includes it, and transcends it only by including it. The truth is truth because it includes and fulfils whatever was positively significant about your idea, by actually fulfilling an idea, that, as inclusive idea, is more significant, is richer, is larger, than yours. The fulfilment of the richer idea may involve what you now call the relative defeat of the less significant idea. Actually, then, while there is error, there is never any absolute or total error believed by anybody. The truth includes all that the illusion meant, and more too. Hence the special and fragmentary meaning of the illusory consciousness may be refuted, but the positive significance of it is kept; just as a man of heroic nature who is morally successful in the midst of a long life of commonplace trials may fulfil the spirit of the illusory hopes of his ignorant youthful ardour, not by the deeds that his boyish imagination painted, but by the endurance that more than accomplishes, in the sight of God, such tasks as his early dreams had defined in their own falsely coloured fashion. Just so, in an ideal world, all quests, as we said before, are fulfilled; and all others, ​and illusions too, are refuted only through the realisation of all that was rationally positive about their meaning.
We cannot say to the finite being, then: “You are infallible; you are subject to no illusions.” On the contrary, we must say: “All finite ideas involve more or less illusion.” But we must add: “No illusion is a total illusion;” and, “You are wrong only in so far as the truth is richer, is more concrete and significant, than is your error.” Therefore, when one asks whether his ideas of his fellows, of the social order, of his wife, of his children, and of his spiritual destiny, are warranted in the light of an idealistic analysis, we reply: “Yes, and No.” They are all sure to be coloured by finite illusions, and that fact you yourself already recognise whenever you reflect. But the truth confirms all that is significant about your meaning, all the essential ideas involved in these illusions, just in so far as they are ideas that have a positive conscious intent and sense. For instance, if your meaning involves essentially moral ideas, then you are, in absolute truth, a member of a real and concrete social and moral order, which contains your life along with the lives of other moral individuals. You are this; for all these ideas, upon analysis, prove to possess an essential positive meaning, such as the Absolute Life inevitably fulfils. Moreover, whatever you do and intend as your act in a moral world really accomplishes what it morally ought to accomplish. So far, then, your life is real, and not illusory. And the Absolute, which includes life of such types, is as genuinely “spiritual” as any definable idea can ask ​it to be. While, then, you may and do misread your social and moral relations in many ways, your real relations are concrete, are social, are moral, and of the types which your experience now suggests to you. And the world-order which contains you is more “spiritual” than your brightest finite dream of spirituality, more social than your closest human intimacy, and infinitely more wealthy than your largest society of human individuals.
The second main objection of Professor Mezes brings into view the general relation between the Absolute and the time-process. Moral significance, he pleads, is essentially bound up with the real time-process as such. In the world of the eternal Now, as far as I defined this world, there is no progress of the whole, the time-process, by hypothesis, being transcended by means of some higher type of inclusive consciousness. Hence, from the point of view of the eternal, nothing morally significant appears to happen. Professor Mezes finds this aspect of my conception ethically unsatisfactory.
A complete reply would involve that elaborate discussion of the metaphysics of the time-process which has already been declined, as beyond the scope of the present paper. In dealing with the problem of Immortality, I have already indicated the kind of answer that I should undertake to develope, did space permit. Here, if you will, is another antinomy, of the same general type as the one discussed with reference to the problem of Individuality. Theory demands that the eternal world should be a finished whole. Morality, as essentially a temporal process, ​now demands, in its turn, that moral activities should be conceived as incapable of being ended in time. The solution of the antinomy would, as before, insist upon the difference of the points of view. It would demand that we render unto eternity the things that are eternity’s. These things are precisely the fulfilled ideals, the attained goals, of the Absolute Life as such. Unto time, on the other hand, we should render the things that are time’s; namely, the processes whose end cannot be temporally conceived, and whose significance lies in their struggle for goals which they find always remote. Illustrations of such twofold realities, drawn from the mathematical world, have been so often repeated as to be philosophically tedious, and I need not dwell upon them here. Any convergent infinite series approaches, as to its sum, an unattainable Limit. When this Limit chances to be definable by us in terms quite other than those which the infinite series embodies, we are able to be, at once, in possession of the Limit, aware that this is the Limit of the infinite series, and able to see how the infinite series is absolutely incapable of ever attaining this its own goal. On the other hand, when the Limit is an irrational number, it is, in general, known to us only as the unattainable goal of an infinite series; and here we see only one aspect of the Limit. Applying the simile, one may declare that the moral consciousness, as such, views its goal only as the term of an infinite series, and so as unattainable. That, from an eternal point of view, this Limit should be viewed as attained, is no more surprising than that the mathematical consciousness should be able to de​fine a quantity in either of two ways: first, as an unattainable Limit, defined only by means of the series which fails to attain it; and, secondly, as the otherwise known quantity which may be viewed as the Limit of a series. Inadequate as is the similitude, it may suffice to hint that the antinomy is soluble. And here there is room only for the hint.
Granting, however, that what appears in time as an endless moral process is known from the eternal point of view as fulfilled fact, Professor Mezes seems to be quite wrong in supposing that the real distinction between the earlier and later stages of a temporal process would vanish, from an eternal point of view. From the point of view which recognises the otherwise known and attained Limit as the unattainable goal of the infinite series, the infinite series itself exists, in its own way and degree; and its earlier terms are still quite distinct from its later terms, so that the earlier, as earlier, retain their definable place and significance in the series. Just so, that the earlier stages of a finite life — a life that appears to us temporally endless, but that, absolutely viewed, is the life of a finite being — are earlier, are present at only one point in time, and are past for all later moments, — this, from the absolute point of view, as from our own, is a fact precisely as real as is time itself. And, as has now been sufficiently pointed out, time does not vanish, from the eternal point of view, any more than any incomplete experience vanishes, from a more inclusive point of view. The Absolute is not, in our account, a Void into which the finite realities pass and vanish. It is precisely such ​a concrete whole as includes every shadow and wavelet of finite experience; and it transcends relatively illusory points of view precisely because it includes them. Therefore, from the absolute point of view, there is real change, and in only one direction, in time; there is real progress wherever there is a temporal success; there is a real difference between past and future time; in brief, all temporal items and significances remain what they are, even while, as included in the completer whole, they are viewed as forming a part of the content of the Eternal Instant. The eternal Now is simply not the temporal present. On the other hand, all present temporal moments are amongst the facts which form the experience of the Absolute Moment. And so, in general, we may say, to Professor Mezes or to any other objector: “Show us what you need for the moral world, in the way of progress, of real difference between past, present, and future, and whatever else you choose to define, and we will undertake to find a place for such facts, precisely in so far as they are facts, in the organisation of the Eternal Moment.”
III PROFESSOR LE CONTE, AND THE CONCEPT OF EVOLUTION
As I approach, finally, the comments of my revered teacher Professor Le Conte, I must first express the strong hope that he may find in this supplementary paper a more or less acceptable development of some ​of the thoughts which he missed in my former definition of the Absolute. In the former paper I observed that the divine Omniscience cannot be the only real divine attribute. In the present paper, I have given very full place to the other divine attributes that Professor Le Conte missed in my previous discussion, — to the attribute which I have called Will, or Love, and to the attribute of Personality. I have indeed especially endeavoured to show the organic connexion between these attributes and that of Omniscience. The very completion of knowledge, so I have asserted, demands a factor in the absolute Unity of consciousness that cannot be defined in purely theoretical terms, with due reference at once to its nature and to that which it determines. This factor, the Will, individuates both the Absolute and its world. Hereby the Absolute becomes a Person, and completes both its knowledge and its personality, through its self-expression in a system of mutually free as well as mutually interrelated, and in so far dependent, moral Selves. To these Selves, from their definition as moral beings, expressive of really distinct elements of the Absolute Will, I have assigned a nature which forbids us to conceive their lives as limited by any definite temporal boundaries. In this sense, while distinctly and deliberately declining to define the concrete nature, or contents, or temporal relations, of any individual immortal life, I have declared that what tradition has called eternal life positively belongs to the moral individual. I do not pretend to know, and absolutely decline to affirm, that any and every being bearing human form rep​resents one of the moral individuals of the eternal world. But I have so defined the moral individual that it is perfectly possible for anybody who is one to discover the fact in self-conscious terms. The other human beings, if such exist, may as well expect to find philosophy sparing of compliments in this matter; and I do not myself think it required by humanity to identify every empirical human being as a separate moral individual. On the contrary, I very much hope that many of the people who phenomenally appear to us as human beings are not, as we see them, distinct moral individuals at all, but mere fragments of a finite personality whose type is hidden from us, and whose individual meaning may therefore be much less sinister than the fragments within our ken would suggest. In immortality as a boon offered to anybody who feels a wish for it, — as a solace for our ill fortune, or as a character to be attributed, by way of social compliment, to any featherless biped who happens to be called a man, — in all this I feel no philosophical and but little personal interest. What we ought to wish to find finally saved, in our own fortune, in our own lives, or in the lives of those whom we love and honour, is distinctly moral personality, conceived as a self-conscious process aiming towards a unique goal, — a goal that cannot be conceived as attainable at any temporal moment. Such individual goals, as Idealism teaches us, must be attained in the eternal world. And in the eternal world there are therefore moral personalities, — individuals, who are yet one in God. The only immortality that I pretend to know about ​is precisely the presence of these individuals in the eternal world. And nothing else, as it seems to me, can be clear to us, as to individual fortunes, apart from particular empirical evidence; which, in this case, we do not possess. My theory, for instance, involves no sort of assertion that individual consciousness is temporally continuous, when one considers the time immediately before and after the death of a human being. As, in this life, consciousness is interrupted by sleep and by accidents, so the temporal processes, in whatever variety they have, which fulfil in their wholeness and in their relations to the eternal order the life of an individual, may be, for all that I can see, in any one of a large number of relations to us and to one another, — contemporaneous, continuously successive, or discontinuously successive, with temporal gaps of any magnitude. As the word “immortality” is commonly and almost inevitably bound up with very definite and, to my mind, very ill-founded hypotheses as to precisely these temporal mysteries, I can make use of the term only in so far as I explicitly add these provisos and explanations. Granting, however, the foregoing metaphysical theory of the individual, and the definitions associated with it, I have defined and defended a theory of immortality which, as I hope, may in some measure supply what my honoured teacher very rightly missed in my original discussion.
This is no place for any adequate consideration of the relation of Idealism to the doctrine of Evolution, — a relation which Professor Le Conte has briefly indicated in his critical paper, with a reference to ​his extensive discussions in other places, and therefore with a suggestion of ideas whose discussion would carry me far beyond the present limits. For the rest, as Professor Le Conte’s pupil, who first learned from his lips the meaning of the doctrine of Evolution, I must frankly confess that, as Professor Le Conte well knows, I have never been able to give to this doctrine, justly central as it is in the world of recent empirical science, the far-reaching, the philosophical, the universal significance which he still attributes to this aspect of reality. Evolution, to me, is not a process in the light of which we can hope to learn much either concerning the Absolute or concerning the relation of the eternal to the temporal world. On the other hand, evolution is by no means any mere illusion or any merely human appearance, without foundation in extra-human metaphysical truth. In recent papers in the Philosophical Review, I have offered, as an hypothesis in philosophical Cosmology, an interpretation of the metaphysics of evolution which, if right, would make this collection of natural processes an indication of a real, and extra-human, finite world of life, whose relations to our own finite life are viewed by us, as it were, in perspective. Thus viewing our relations to other finite life in the universe, we naturally conceive the portions of the finite world more distant from us in type as lifeless, and the various forms of life which, in temporal sequence, or in contemporaneous relations to us, gradually approach our own type as indicative of a real progress from what we call “dead Nature” to our own grade. This process, ​so far as we view it as a real progress from death to life, or from even what Professor Le Conte calls a diffused form of Divine Energy to a personal form, is not yet rightly viewed. Nature, on any level, is, according to my hypothesis, a hint of “other finite life than ours,” — of a life presumably as individuated, as concrete, as our own; only that such life, by virtue of what I have hypothetically regarded as a “difference in the time-span,” or length of a “typical passing present moment,” or else by virtue of other differences, is so remote from ours that both its meaning and its individuation are unintelligible to us, so far as we appeal to direct experience. Thus, for instance, a being whose present moments were a million years long might have a very definite finite individuation, but though my finite experience gave me hints of the mere existence of his life, I should fail entirely, within my time-span, to observe any significant events in that life. In brief, in view of such hypotheses we should have no right to speak of “dead Nature,” but only of “uncommunicative Nature.” And the process of evolution would have to be viewed, not as a process whereby dead Nature passed into life, or diffused Energy into individuated form, but as a process whereby our finite human type of life has become differentiated in the midst of a world some of whose individuals are nearer to us, in the “time-span” of their consciousness, or in other respects, than are others. I have not here to defend or develope such hypotheses. Enough, so long as they seem to me even bare possibilities I must regard natural evolution as a process too ambiguous to ​admit of any one assured metaphysical interpretation. Least of all could I hope to find in the consideration of this process the solution of any metaphysical problem so fundamental as are the problems of Evil, of Freedom, of Immortality, or, in general, of the relations of the Absolute and the Individual.
* ↑ Throughout the whole following discussion the reader may notice, from time to time, the influence of various special discussions that occur in Mr. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. I acknowledge this influence the more readily in view of the fact that after all, as will appear, I often dissent from Mr. Bradley’s conclusions. But there is space only for this general acknowledgment.
* ↑ Sigwart, Logik, 2d ed., I, 90: “Was ‘ist,’ das ist nicht bloss von meiner Denkthätigkeit erzeugt, sondern unabhängig von derselben, bleibt dasselbe, ob ich es im Augenblick vorstelle oder nicht.” Id., I, 44: “Der Satz: Kein Objekt ohne Subjekt, ist im demselben Sinne wie der Satz: Ein Reiter kann nicht zu Fuss gehn.” These are typical expressions of realistic presuppositions, taken from a representative modern book.
* ↑ I may here refer to my paper on The External World and the Social Consciousness, in the Philosophical Review for September, 1894.
* ↑ Concerning the concept of “experience not my own,” compare discussions both in my article cited p. 148, note, and in an article entitled Self-Consciousness, Social Conscioustiess, and Nature, which I printed in the Philosophical Review, July and September, 1895.
* ↑ [Professor Howison heartily accepts this principle, but rejects its applicability to his position. He has not the least wish to have allegiance to the City of God unstained “by reflective definition.” His use of this allegiance (see pp. 123-125 above) is simply as a stubborn Warning that any logical system which fails to satisfy it is defective, and requires revision. — Ed.]
* ↑ [Professor Howison also holds that this way of regarding the category of Individuality is fallacious. But he denies that a plurality of minds, each a centre of genuine origination both as to thought and as to conduct, involves this fallacy. — Ed.]
* ↑ The considerations presented in the following section have been more fully developed in a paper entitled “Some Observations upon the Anomalies of Self-Consciousness.” (Psychological Review for September, 1895.)
* ↑ [Doubtless. But their “moral relations,” to be moral, must be relations set up by their rational self-activity, not imposed upon them by God. Professor Royce appears to conceive that “infinity” means indeterminate caprice, boundless self-will. Professor Howison does not so conceive of it. To him, rational self-activity is alone “infinite,” in the true sense; the mere limitless is only the false infinite. — Ed.]
* ↑ [No, not to Idealism, but to Idealistic Monism. Professor Howison submits that calling this objection — that Monism is irreconcilable with the self-activity indispensable in a moral world — a “superstition,” is indeed a striking novelty, be the objection as “ancient” as it may. — Ed.]
* ↑ [Professor Howison, in a full apprehension of the questions involved, does not admit that the unity of consciousness transcends Individuality. On the contrary, Individuality is itself the highest category — the very nerve of knowledge. This is not only the clear implication, but the real significance, of Professor Royce’s whole argumentation for the presence of what he calls “Will” at the heart of reality. — Ed.]