Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/275

238 of the “identity of indiscernibles,” and of individuation through mere ideal or typical variety, fails to meet all the conditions of our problem.

So a second definition of individuality is needed, and a second method must be tried. When one says: Universals or ideas have no concrete or ultimately real existence, but are artificial products of the process of knowledge, or when one tries to mediate, as the scholastics did, between this view and opposing views, by the famous distinction between the universals ante res (viz., in God’s mind), in rebus (merely as the formal or ideal aspects of reality, — the laws and types present in the natural world), and post res (namely, as the abstractions of the human mind), — in every such doctrine one contrasts the individual and the universal aspects either of reality itself or of our human conception of reality. In any case, whether one is nominalist or conceptualist, or even Platonic realist, one is bound to tell what one means by this contrast between individual existence as such and universality of type as such, — and that, too, no matter how much one insists that the real world contains no universals, but only individuals, and no matter how much, on the contrary, one despises the individuals, and regards the universal aspect of reality as the truth.

One turns, then, to the second method of defining individuals. Individuals are segmented objects of knowledge; but then, as we have just seen, not all segmented objects of knowledge are individuals. How does the individuality of experience differ from the sort of segmentation that exists in the world of