Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/294

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Our other question, as to the metaphysics of individuality, now gets its parallel restatement. Laying the problem of knowledge aside, and passing to Being, to what principle is the individuation of the world due? To the ultimate and immediate brute fact of the segmentation of things? But that answer is impossible. For segmentation, as a mere brute fact, is not identical with uniqueness. Colour is a brute fact; but it is not unique. Good and evil are brute facts, — pain and pleasure, up and down, right and left, past and future, are not only facts, but facts with strong contrasts and segmentations about them. Yet this does not constitute them, in so far, facts or cases of individuality. Individuation is not identical with the brute fact of segmentation.

On the other hand, is individuation due to some rational law of ideal differentiation in the world? Just as little can that be so; for where law differentiates truth, where general processes combine to determine results, the product of such ideal differentiation, or combination, is this or that type of truth, — never this unique case. Individuation is therefore not due to a process that merely specifies universal types. Curves may be of this or of that more and more specified type; but hereby one never defines an individual curve, — only a type of curves.

Individuals are describable enough, if only, — as I said before, — if only you assume other previous individuals to which to relate them. But what universal process, or combination of processes, or overlaying of types, shall produce your first individual?

Thus, then, the individual, as it would seem, must be