Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/476

Rh contrasted aspects. Long before we can ever say, with even a shadow of plausibility, that we ourselves have known and experienced the unique presence of any single fact, as such, our restless finite will itself has demanded that the real world wherein our will seeks, and logically speaking, ultimately finds, its fulfilment, shall be altogether determinate, both in so far as nothing further is needed to complete it, and in so far as nothing else would meet the needs which constitute finite ideas.

But owing to our finitude, will, in our own case, far anticipates its own fulfilment. The individual, therefore, as a conceived object of inquiry, of desire, and of knowledge, appears in our finite human thought as something that we early define much more in terms of selective exclusion than of empirically observed completeness. We presuppose the individual in both the foregoing senses; viz., as selected and as complete. But, if you look closely at that region of our consciousness where first we come nearest to facing what we take to be an experience of individuality, you find, I think, that it is our selective attention, especially as embodied in what one may call our exclusive affections, which first brings home to us what we mortals require an individual being to be. How in fact should a finite being, whose experience constantly passes from one partial fulfilment to another, from one vague general idea to another instance of the same generality, — how should such a being, I say, come to be so sure as most of us are that he has actually stood in the presence of individuals, and has faced beings that are unique? Yet every man supposes, to take perfectly ordinary instances, that his own father and mother are real