Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/561

No. 5.] and the like, are prolongations in another, and, in the writer's opinion, a far more promising, direction. So we can come to say that an individual is lacking in individuality, i.e. shows this universal characteristic of reality too indistinctly, seems to lend himself too easily to 'explanation' by universals, seems to borrow too much from others, and the like.

But this in nowise trenches upon the value of individuality. It simply postulates that we must learn to think of the individuality of the real as we have learned to think of its reality, not as a completed being, but as a becoming, i.e. as being a process. That which we designate by the term individuality is a varying and growing quantity, never wholly absent, but not always fully developed. At the one end of the process are the atoms — of which we can hardly discern the individuality. At the other end are — let us say the angels — individuals so perfectly individualized that, as mediæval doctors taught, each would form a species by himself.

And with all deference to the magni nominis umbra, wherewith the Absolute has overshadowed the minds of philosophers, it seems to me that it is to some such conclusion as this that the course of science tends, rather than to a single merely rational 'universal law,' from which all existences might be necessarily deduced by purely logical processes. Of the difficulties which the latter alternative involves Mr. Ritchie gives us a sample on page 277, which is valuable as containing a recognition by one of his school, belated and inadequate though that recognition be, of the gravity of questions that should have been considered before ever it was enunciated that reality was Thought. This is not the place to discuss what meaning, if any, can be attached to the dictum that "Thought realizes (does not this covertly reassert the distinction it pretends to explain away?) itself in its Other in order to return into itself," but it may be remarked that Mr. Ritchie's "dilemma," which drives him to such a solution, presents no difficulties to those who hold that the real is individual. For if the universe be constituted by the interactions of real individuals, some or all of whom display as one of their activities what we call 'thought,' there is no such 'irrational' and 'alien' Other as troubles Mr. Ritchie; for what 'confronts thought' is merely the whole of which it is the part and the practical interpreter. Nor does thought itself ever claim more for itself than this, whether it be in its reference of every proposition to a reality beyond it, or in its recognition of the necessity that an activity presupposes a real being as its substrate, or in its ultimate foundation of all proof on the self-evident.

Thus it is only an infirmity of our reason, causing us to hypostasize abstractions, which leads us to speak of 'universal laws of nature,' as if they were more than shorthand expressions for the habitual interactions of realities. But as the subtlety of our insight draws nearer to the