Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/278

Rh in more than one single instance. Or, yet again, the logical individual is the essentially unique being.

But let us put these two aspects of individuality together. For it is admitted, as Thomas throughout implies, that we believe in individuals, either because, as a fact, we experience their presence, or because we conclude their concrete reality by reasoning from our experience, as Thomas does in case of God, or because we get their presence somehow revealed to us indirectly, as, for Thomas, revelation assures us of the Trinity and of the hosts of the angels. On the other hand, it is sure, as Scotus insists, and as Thomas too would admit, that we logically mean the individual to be intelligibly different from the universal, in precisely the abstracter way just defined. But what then? Is not our true problem at last fully before us? We observe or otherwise learn of the concrete and segmented masses of contents in the world of fact. And now — here is the puzzle — we are somehow sure that each of these segmented objects, in respect of just what we call its individuality, is unique in its individual kind, represents a class that can have but one possible representative, or is the sole individual of its own separated sort. Now the real questions are: What do we mean by this assertion? How come we to be so sure of it, and what is the metaphysically real condition of this segmentation of the unique? These are the questions as to the Principle of Individuation.

In Thomas’s answer, the philosopher tries, with characteristic simplicity and kindly fidelity to the facts as he sees them, to reduce, so far as possible,