Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/293

256 individuals, although we could for other reasons, yet to be considered, individuate even the melodies. But as the melody which excludes all other melodies from the field of attention at the time when it occupies this field is not thereby presented as an individual, but only as a universal, so the sense-object that excludes others from possessing the local signs which it then presents is not thereby presented as an individual.

The fundamental reason why such highly popular views as the foregoing appear so plausible, and fill so much place in the ordinary accounts, is that it never occurs to us, in ordinary discussion, to ask what it is that makes this individual place or moment an individual at all. We assume that the this is, as such, an individual. But in fact the mere this is the barest of abstractions. It usually becomes an individual, at any moment, by virtue of its relation to myself, the constantly presupposed central individual of daily life. But how came I to be an individual?

Our result, then, so far is, that one might hopefully say: Give me first one single individual, known as segmented and unique, and then I will undertake, with experience enough, to define a whole universe of unique individuals. But our present problem is, how to get that first individual. So far, then, we have a restatement, in quite our own way, of the problem as to our own knowledge of the individual. Either experience or thought, it would seem, must determine such knowledge, but neither can do so, nor can both together; for each appeals to the other in vain to answer the question: What is This Individual?