Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/304

Rh individuality would be that individuality, in so far as it is present in the finite world, is essentially a teleological category. Objects are individuals in so far as they are unique expressions of essentially exclusive ideals, ends, Divine decrees. This consideration must govern every concrete application of our category. In biology, the individual viewed as the unique variation of its type has often been made, of late, as it was by Darwin, the centre of the definition of individuality as known to that science. That such absolutely unique variations exist cannot, I suppose, be proved, except upon presuppositions of the sort herein defined. But the teleological interest of such variations for the process of evolution makes this provisional definition of the biological individual — namely, as a mass of living matter sufficiently well organised to represent apparently unique variations of a type — the most philosophically interesting of the various biological definitions of individuality, just because the unique variation is, as such, a conception of a relatively teleological significance for the evolutionary theory. If anywhere such unique variations are unobservable, one has on one’s hands only an indefinite universal, — masses of living matter alike except as to their place; and then one might as well call the descendants of any given cell a single individual.

As to our old friend, Socrates the moral individual, he is and can be metaphysically differentiated and individuated only by the fact, if it be a fact, that the Absolute finds in him the fulfilment of an exclusive interest, such as, in this individual world, nobody else