Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/477

458 individuals, and that other men, too, even where their individuality has been far less closely scrutinized, are still in themselves somehow individuals. Every man also early believes that the world as a whole, whether he regards it as one or as many, is at all events an individual collection of individuals. Yet to make this assertion is in any case far to transcend any man’s actual experience, regarded merely as that experience comes to us. For what we find in our finite wanderings are always cases of types, instances of imperfectly fulfilled meanings. In observing my father, what I each time experience must necessarily be merely the presence to my mind of a certain kind of experience. That the object of this experience is unique, that in all the universe there is no other like it, how should I myself ever experience this fact? That this theorem about individuality is itself true, is precisely what our Fourth Conception of Being has now asserted. For whatever the relation between the finite idea and the whole world may be, this we already know from our Fourth Conception, namely that the world in its unity is an individual whole, such that no other could take its place as an expression of this one purpose.

Our idea of individuality comes to our finite consciousness, therefore, rather on the selective side of this consciousness than upon the side of its present fulfilment. It is not so much what I already know about an individual as what my affections determine to regard as unique in the value of my object, that first brings home to me, in the case of my father or my mother or my home or my personal possessions, or my own life, and later only in the case of indifferent beings, the uniqueness of the object in