Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/341



Individuality, contingency, freedom, — these, as we have seen, are profoundly interrelated categories. Necessity concerns the finite interrelationships of thought — the universal, the finite links that tie fact to fact, the definable laws of being. The individual fact fulfils ideas, but is never wholly defined by them; embodies universals, but never can be analysed into them; conforms to law, but can never be wholly explained by law. What it is, ideas more or less fully tell us, just in so far as it has a universal nature. But no ideas ever tell us what constitutes it this individual object. So far, older theories of the individual have gone, when they defined the individual as the brute fact of sense. But our theory of the individual has gone still further. We have seen that mere immediacy of experience, the mere fact of sense as such, is not yet enough to constitute individuality. The individual is not merely this, but such a this that its place can be taken by “no other.” And, as such, the individual this, as we have seen, thus exists only as the object of an exclusive interest, and not merely as the object of a defining thought, or as the immediate datum of experience. But, as an object of an exclusive interest, the true individual of the ultimate real world is a fact that expresses the free Interest, or Love, of the Absolute as Will. A true individual, as such, is therefore itself a free fact. Its existence is not determined by the ideas that it embodies, nor even by the prior constitution of a fatal world of immediate experience. So far as these facts are concerned, many other data might have filled the place of this