Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/604

Rh or with any temporal or spatial terminus. A finished series of data simply does not constitute an individual whole merely by becoming finished. It is perfectly true that such a finished whole, with its boundary, its last term, or what limit you will, may be viewed and rightly viewed, as an individual; but only for reasons which lie far deeper than its mere possession of limits, and which, in their turn, might be present if such limits were quite undiscoverable. If you insist that only such limited wholes are ever viewed by us men as individual wholes, I retort that we men have never experienced the direct presence of any individual whole whatever. For us, individuals are primarily the objects presupposed, but never directly observed, by love and by its related passions, — in brief, by the exclusive affections which give life all its truest interests. As we associate these affections with those contents of experience whose empirical limits we also experience as essential to their form, the spatially or numerically boundless comes to seem (as it especially seemed to the Greek), the essentially formless, and hence unindividuated realm, where chaos reigns.

But such mere prejudices of our ordinary apprehension vanish, if we look more closely at what individual wholeness means. Never presented in our human experience, individuality is the most characteristic feature of Being. Its true definition, however, implies three features, no one of which has any necessary connection with last terms, or with ends, or with any other such accidents of ordinary sense perception, and of the temporal enumeration of details. These three features are as follows: First, an individual whole must conform to an ideal definition, which is precise, and free from ambiguity, so that if you know this individual type, you know in advance precisely what kind of fact belongs to the defined whole, and in what way. Secondly, the individual whole must embody this type in the form of immediate experience. And thirdly, the individual whole must so embody the type that no other embodiment would meet precisely the purpose, the Will, fulfilled by this embodiment.