Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/605

586 It is the third of these features that is the really decisive one. The satisfied Will, as such, is the sole Principle of Individuation. This is our theory of individuality. Here it comes to our aid.

For wherever in the universe these three conditions are together fulfilled, determinate individual wholeness gets presented. In our human experience their union, as a fact, is only postulated, and never found present, in the objects which constitute our empirical world. Hence in vain do you choose empirical series such as have last terms, and say, “Lo! these are typical individual wholes. If the Absolute sees individuality, in any collection of facts, he sees it as of this determinate type.” On the contrary, as we men observe these things, they appear to us to be individuals, solely because we presuppose our own individuality as Selves, and then, in the light of this presupposition, regard these serial acts of ours as individual wholes, merely because in them we have found a relative satisfaction of a purpose.

That finite series are individual wholes at all, is therefore itself a presupposition — never a datum. I take myself to be an individual Self, whose acts, as my own, are unique with the assumed uniqueness of my own purposes. Any one of the various series of my acts which attains, for the moment, its relative goal, is thereby the more marked as my own, and as one. But it is not directly experienced as any individual fact of Being at all, and that for the reason set forth in our seventh lecture. That we are individuals is true, and that our finite series of acts have their own place in Being is also true. But their finitude has only accidental relations to their individuality.

But now, in case of such a Kette as we are supposing real, what is lacking to constitute it a determinate whole? It has ideal totality. For a single ideal purpose defines the type of all facts that shall belong to it, and distinguishes them from facts of all other types, and predetermines their order, assigning to every element its ideal place. We suppose now an experience embodying all these elements in such wise that immediacy and idea completely fuse, so that what is here