Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/281

244 the esse of Socrates in God, before the creation, was as individual as Socrates now is! Here then is Socrates, the unique individual, present twice in the world of being, — as uncreated but known, as created, yet to God also known.

Now, is this difficulty a mere accident of the Thomistic theology? I think not. From any point of view, as we see, the question arises, not merely: Is there the individual Socrates? but: What is the individual Socrates? — how is the idea of him defined? If this question is answerable, then wherever the answer is supposed to be absolutely adequate the esse of Socrates gets, in the world of absolute being, two exemplifications, or else Socrates is no longer an individual in so far as individuality means uniqueness. But if the question is unanswerable, then individuality remains, for God as for men, either an unintelligible brute fact, or something still to be pointed out by philosophy.

Yet, even if this problem of the Divine knowledge, and of the esse of the uncreated Socrates, had been set aside as essentially above our comprehension, the question would recur, for Thomas as for others, in other forms. Socrates is known as this man to at least one angel, viz., his own angelus custodiens, or guardian angel. But angels are intellective beings, who sense no brute facts as mere facts, but know what is for them essentially intelligible. Moreover, Socrates reflectively, if inadequately, knows himself to be nobody but himself. Hence, for self-consciousness, individuality is not a mere brute fact, but means something, — is ideal, formal, universal, and, as Duns