Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/98

 85 controversy is, that while we may and must assume individuality as given to us (pp. 480, 483), universality is the result of a logical process. As to this I have to say : 1. Mr Hodgson is misled by an ambiguity in the use of the term ' individual '. In one sense (in which it cannot be the subject- matter of any science) it is given to us ; in another (in the sense in which it is an object of scientific knowledge) it is not given to us, but is a product of psychological experience. Every experi- ence is given to us as a unique experience, a fact of absolute and immediate interest. Individuality in this sense is indeed an assumption which we need not care to avoid. But this assump- tion is only the assumption that a fact exists ; it tells us nothing of the meaning of the fact. And it is the assumption that we know at the outset, what individuality means, and that the imme- diate fact of experience is the same as an interpretation of the fact, which plays such havoc with Mr. Hodgson's ideas. It is this assumption which enables him to slide unconsciously from the immediate unique interest which accompanies every experi- ence, and which makes it mine or thine, to the fact of individuality, as one being among others, limited in space and time, and whose ideas occur as a " stream ". Individuality in this sense is not " given," is not "immediate." and is an assumption which we must avoid making until we see what it means until, in short, it is not an assumption. Individuality in this sense may be provi- sionally opposed to universality, but this sense is not an original or immediate dictum. It is a product which has corne about through experience, through psychological experience. The pro- cess of its coming about, the way in which this gets to be a fact of our conscious experience, is something to be examined by psy- chology. The psychological standpoint is prior, so to speak, to this result. It is confusion enough to substitute this psychologi- cal product for the immediate individuality which is a matter of feeling, but to substitute a philosophical interpretation of the fact is to carry the confusion a step further. And this Mr. Hodgson does in giving individuality a meaning that is, an interpretation which opposes it absolutely to universality. One thing which Mr. Hodgson would have learned by going to psychology rather than to metaphysics would be to avoid this threefold confusion of the individuality of immediate feeling, of constructed fact of experience and of philosophical interpretation of the fact. 2. The substitution appears, however, in a still worse plight when we consider that this view of individuality which opposes it absolutely to universality is an incorrect interpretation. I speak, not as a Germanising transcendentalist, but according to my humble lights as a psychologist, when I say that I know nothing of a perceptual order apart from a conceptual, and nothing of an agent or bearer apart from the content which it bears. As a psychologist, I see the possibility of abstractly analysing each from the other, and, if I were as fond of erecting the results of an