Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/274

Rh in the outer world, as when I see that this stone is another object than that stone. In any case, individuals are, so far, facts of direct or of revealed experience. So the world is made; viz., with separated or segmented masses of observable contrast in it. Individuality first means just this observable or immediate discreteness of structure in the universe. One might seek to rest here, and might ask: Where then is the problem? The universe is cut up into segments. That is matter of fact. One can as little tell what such segmentation in general is, as one can tell what colour is. One observes the fact. The ultimate principle at the basis of it all may be known to God, but is not for us to know.

But there is another and a puzzling aspect about this individualisation of the world. Discreteness exists not only in the world of facts, but in the world of ideas, and not only as the discreteness of individuals, but as the discreteness of universals. The numbers are discrete; yet they are not individuals in the sense in which Socrates and Plato are individuals. Good and evil, white and black, colour and sound, cause and effect, motion and rest, are present to our minds as various, as distinguished, as discretely sundered objects of possible knowledge. Yet these are not individuals. Our problem is then unfinished. We need to know, about the individual, not merely what in experience distinguishes one individual from another individual, but what distinguishes the individual, as such, from other objects of knowledge, viz., from the various types of the universal. And here is a reason why Leibnitz’s later and famous doctrine