Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/270

Rh although its corporeal dimensions change; while, on the other hand, when the corporeal individual is corrupted, the same quantitatively determined matter remains, but the individual is lost. Furthermore, quantitative distinctions in the material world, i.e. distinctions of position, shape, and the like, are all of them primarily known to us in universal form, — not as individual but as specific characters of the object that we have before us. Quantity is no more and no less individuated for our reason than is any other object of thought. This place, this shape, this size, and this definite matter, are just as hard to define in an individual way as this angelic nature, or this immaterial soul.

In consequence of these and many other considerations, Scotus considers himself warranted in substituting for the Thomistic theory of the individual another statement, namely, first, that, wherever an individual exists, there exists, as the background of the individual, a certain common nature (e.g. man exists as the background of Socrates), and this common nature has indeed its unity, but a unity “less than the numeral unity” of the individual. Secondly, the doctrine asserts that, added to this unity, in case of the individual, there is another, and, as Scotus strongly insists, a “positive entitas,” or “individual nature,” which per se determines the common nature to singularity. This positive entitas, or, as the Scotists later always called it, the hæcceitas (although it is not certain that Scotus himself, in his authentic writings, uses this latter technical term), “makes one with” the common nature, or, in the individual, is