Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/258

Rh 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