Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/256

Rh 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,