Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/297

260 himself already remarked, and as the scholastics often repeat, he “calls all men fathers and mothers,” — or, in other words, uses language not for the individual but for the types, which, in the midst of the shifting variety of his experience, he learns to recognise as the same types, persisting in the many presentations. The many presentations he cannot yet know as many individuals; for he has no such power to grasp single facts for their own sake. Such power comes only late.

The one that persists for the child through the many, — this, by virtue of its persistent contrast with unrecognisable confusions, he gradually learns to recognise as the one. But this one is the universal, the type, the idea. If you do not believe this, watch any young child calling flies “dogs,” or independently recognising pine cones as potatoes, or thoughtfully saying “piece of moon all torn” when he happens to observe a bright star, — and you will know what I mean by asserting that not only the first unconscious general ideas, but also the first explicitly conscious ideas, are of the universal, as such. In all such cases the background of the universe is not yet the individual, but the unrecognisably confused many, the relatively undifferentiated mass of changing contents, which the child does not make out, and does not know except as the background of the universals that he does know.

On the lines thus defined, the child might proceed, for all that I can see, indefinitely, without ever reaching the knowledge of true individuality, were he merely a theoretical thinker. But now observe him