Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/287

250 paper, even our empirical self-consciousness is no exception to this rule. The self, as the mere empirical this, borrows its individuality from the presupposed social individuality to which it is related. The empirical ego, in its phenomenal presence, is a social contrast-effect. I am this individual, in ordinary life, because of my determinate and conscious relation to other assumed individuals.

But the holder of the doctrine that experience does come to us wholly individuated is accustomed to insist still more elaborately upon space and time as principles of individuation; and fairness demands a little closer examination of this thesis, which nowadays may be said to hold the field in all the customary presentations of the problem of the individual. Accounts such as that of Wundt, in his Logik, — accounts of which very many examples might be found in modern literature, — declare the original of our idea of the individual to be the this in space and time, the here-and-now object. The object, thus individuated in space and time, as this empirically impenetrable thing, whose place cannot now be occupied by another thing, is supposed to be followed thenceforth by our consciousness, and identified by virtue of the continuity of its appearance as it changes its place, or as it is seen again from time to time; and thus, as one supposes, the concept of the individual gets differentiated. The uniqueness of the individual means, from this point of view, simply the experience that no other object can occupy the same place at the same time. Were our experience ideally continuous, we should follow this same object from place to place, and perceive