Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/295

258 either brute fact or ideally definable result, i.e. combination of universal processes or types. And nevertheless, as now appears, the individual can be neither the one nor the other.

To define such a problem exactly is already far more than half the answer. My result, so far, is that individuality, although it is known by and in the unity of consciousness, is a category indefinable in purely theoretical terms. But, in so far, the cause of the individual is not at all a lost cause. As a fact, the world that we live in, as a moral world, although through and through knowable, is even more a practically significant than it is a theoretically definable world. And I may as well at once simply say, that, to my mind, the concept of the individual, in its primary and original sense, is distinctly an ethical concept, and that it is so whether you speak in terms of knowledge or in terms of being. Theoretically definable individuality there is, to be sure, in plenty, if by definition you merely mean the process of designating new individuals through an appeal to relationships to the presupposed individuality of other individuals. Such is the process which I just now exemplified. Individuality is like a ferment. Introduce the germ of it into your world of knowledge, and the universe soon swarms as with yeast, and individuality bubbles