Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/295

No. 3.] If the redness and the heaviness and the stickiness of the lump of clay are put aside as being only universals, what remains except that metaphysical phantom of the thing-in-itself? Even if we deal with the organic, the individual organism for science and for ordinary belief is only an individual from some points of view; it is a collection of units from other points of view. This horse is an individual; but so is this hair out of this horse's tail. So is every cell of which its body is composed. If we take "individual" strictly we must get back to atoms. But the qualities of the atoms, if they have any, must be universals. If they have no qualities, not even impenetrability nor indivisibility, are they even atoms? Are they not fictions of our minds — convenient or otherwise?

(3) It might be answered that qualities are real, but only as individual sensations. I have already shown that the individual sensation is not at all what the plain man understands by reality. The individual sensation is an abstraction, a metaphysical phantom, except as my sensation or your sensation and except as discriminated from other sensations; i.e. except as interpreted by thought. The feeling of the moment is real only in that sense of the term which is least familiar to the unsophisticated mind.

(4) Well, then, is the individual the conscious self which has sensations? Are the ultimate reals monads or spiritual atoms? This is a possible metaphysical speculation, and by the help of it a very pretty picture of the universe may be made, a sort of glorified or "animated" atomism. But is it not a speculation which results simply from taking literally the popular Vorstellung of independent individual persons, while discarding the popular Vorstellung of independent individual things. Berkeley applied analysis to material substances and resolved them into "ideas" (i.e. sensations plus images of sensations); and yet he left a world of individual spiritual substances existing alongside of one another. Hume applied to mind the same analysis which Berkeley had applied to matter, and resolved mind into its component parts also. If by the "self" we mean the person who is born, grows up, dies — the concrete phenomenal ego — what