Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/296

Rh out everywhere. For in relation to any one individual, you can define countless other individuals. But the first individual you can only know by breathing the breath of a new life into the otherwise dead and stubbornly universal categories of merely abstract theory. Man individuates the objects of his knowledge because he is an ethical being. God individuates the objects of his own world, and knows them as individuals, for no other reason. This will be my own thesis. In short, to use familiar but still not unphilosophical terms, I propose briefly to show that the Principle of Individuation, in us as in reality, is identical with the principle that has sometimes been called Will, and sometimes Love. Our human love is a good name for what first individuates for us our universe of known objects. We have good reason for saying that it is the Divine Love which individuates the real world wherein the Divine Omniscience is fulfilled.

And now the way to this result is simple enough. A child’s first ideas are all unconsciously universal, or vaguely abstract, ideas. He does not early know individuals as such. He does very early know more or less indefinite types. Moreover, not only the child’s early half-conscious ideas, but his first explicitly conscious ideas, are in their origin imitative, and in their nature contrast-effects, due to the comparison of similarities and varieties in his own acts, and in the acts of others, and in the forms and colours of like and unlike objects. And in so far the child’s first conscious ideas must be of what we call the universal, as such. In his first use of language, as Aristotle