Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/283

246 your mind with the empirical individuals of sense and of revelation. For these segmented facts, as they present themselves, are indeed sundered; but they are not yet logical individuals. For the logical individual is not the segmented as such, but the unique as such, — viz., that which is sole in its kind. No empirical character, — not the mere fact of existence, — not immediate material presence, — not even quantitatively determined matter, which is but another name for an intelligible type, — can explain individuality. An individual is such because of its hæcceitas, i.e. because its ideally intelligible nature determines the universal to an essentially unique expression. This is the notion of Scotus; and we saw that the angelic doctor Thomas, who in his beautiful way sees all sides of his subject, but who, with his gentle discretion, always avoids recognising his own inconsistencies, by reason of his instinctively skilful and imperturbable silence to all his most intractable problems, — we saw that he, too, substantially admits as much as Scotus demands, while explicitly making prominent in his mind the empirical aspects of individuality. Of the two thinkers, Thomas, in fact, is the more instructive, just because, as to this matter, he is the more empirical and the more inconsistent. Yet even Scotus is wholly unable to tell us what the hæcceitas is. That he leaves to God and the angels. He only knows what the hæcceitas does. Fusing with universals, it makes individuals. And so, in character, it is comparable to Kant’s “Schema,” since it is an idea when it gets amongst the ideas, but is a this when it is viewed in the world of experience. Like the bat in