Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/273

236 nerve of the problem lies. The very naïveté of that Aristotelian theory of knowledge which the scholastics agree in employing, helps to render simpler the statement of the issue. Let us, then, next restate the matter more in our own way, pointing out, as we go, how our two representative scholastics, although differing in terms and in emphasis, really face the same problem, and leave it in much the same obscurity.

There are individuals in the universe. That is a matter of “common opinion,” or in other words, is known to everybody. Moreover, Aristotle says, and our scholastics agree, that our human insight begins through some sort of more or less vague, and even indefinitely universal, knowledge of individual objects. But next comes the question: How do you define, in a purely formal way, the connotation of the term “individual”? Here, at once, two methods of definition appear. One method, that made the more prominent in Thomas, seems dependent directly upon experience, or upon revelation, and tells us what it is that is empirically needed in order that one individual should be regarded as different from other individuals. As a fact, then, the world contains individuals in so far as it contains objects “indistinct,” or undivided within themselves, ab aliis vero distincta. This, as we may remember, is what Thomas says. Thus one first appeals to mere facts. They may be viewed as revealed facts, — as in case of the Trinity or of the angels, — or as facts of self-consciousness, as in case of my own individuality, which I feel to be other than yours; or they may be facts observed