Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/312

Rh however, the possibility of characterizing, or portraying, the features that are to make yonder external individual unique, has been surrendered in the very act of trying to define what constitutes him an individual. For your object is another, and you here, by hypothesis, know it merely through ideally imitating it and “corresponding” to it. But as individual, the unique Being is to be precisely something that has no likeness. Hence, just so far as you define it, you define of it everything but its individuality. Socrates defined, is no longer the unique external meaning, — the individual Being as such. He has now become a mere conceived type of man. That this type has but one real expression, you may, from the side of your internal meanings, dogmatically assert or inevitably presuppose. But you can never tell what, about that kind of man called Socrates, forbids him to get repeated expression in the universe, unless you have expressed the secret of Being in terms different from those involved in this sundering of the external and the internal meanings. The same is true if you try thus abstractly to define what makes either God or the world One Individual, that has no likeness.

But if ideas, as internal meanings opposed to external objects, cannot express the nature of the individuality of the world or of any one Being in it, whence, then, do we ever get this belief that Being is, in fact, individual? Does perhaps our external experience present to us individuals? The answer is again simply, No. If, when you define Socrates in inner idea, you define a type of man, and not an unique Being without any likeness, it is equally true that, if ever you had an experience which