Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/475

456 a clear idea of what his science regards as the constitution of any of its individual objects. It is far easier to know something about the circulation of the blood, than to have any adequate knowledge of the medical aspects of the case of an individual man whose circulation is in any way deranged by disease. It is precisely the individual case that constitutes the goal of the physician's knowledge. In general a real knowledge of individual facts is the ideal aim of science, rather than the beginning of any form of human insight; and this one can observe to be true, quite apart from any metaphysical conception of what constitutes individuality.

Yet it is indeed perfectly true that, long before we have any scientific approach to a knowledge of the individual facts of the natural world, we all of us somehow believe that the world contains individual beings. And the historical prominence of the thesis that whatever is, is individual, the prominence, I say, of this thesis in the metaphysics of all ages, is due to deep reasons which seldom come to the clear consciousness of those who are accustomed to talk glibly about individuality. Only our Fourth Conception of Being is able to make the conception at once rational and explicit. It is, so we have asserted, precisely as the final and satisfactory expression of the whole will of an idea that any object can be regarded as unique. But what makes the presupposition that objects are individual precisely in so far as they are real appear so early in human thought, and exercise such a controlling influence over the development of science, is precisely that demand of the finite idea for wholeness of expression, which we have just analyzed in both of its