FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 185 



of One and Many to Time and Space is trustworthy and exact. What 

 place and function in philosophy must Space and Time be given? - 

 for they certainly have a place and function; they certainly are 

 among the inexpugnable conceptions with which thought has to 

 concern itself when it undertakes to gain a view of the whole. But 

 it may be easy to give them a larger place and function than belong 

 to them by right. Is it true, then, that the One and the Many - - that 

 the system of Numbers, in short --are unthinkable except as in 

 Space and Time, or, at any rate, in Time? Or, to put the question 

 more exactly, as well as more gravely and more pertinently, Are 

 Space and Time the true principia individui, and is Time preemi- 

 nently the ultimate principium indimduationis ? Is there accordingly 

 no individuality, and no society, no associative assemblage, except 

 in the fleeting world of phenomena, dated and placed? Simply to ask 

 the question, and thus bring out the full drift of this Kantian doc- 

 trine, is almost to expose the absurdity of it. Such a doctrine, though 

 it may be wisely refusing to confound personality, true individuality, 

 with the mere logical singular; nay, worse, with a limited and special 

 illustration of the singular, the one here or the one there, the one now 

 or the one then ; nevertheless, by confining numerability to things 

 material and sensible, makes personal identity something unmeaning 

 or impossible, and destroys part of the foundation for the relations 

 of moral responsibility. Though the vital trait of the person, his 

 genuine individuality, doubtless lies, not in his being exactly num- 

 erable, but in his being aboriginal and originative; in a word, in his 

 self-activity, in his being a centre of autonomous social recognition; 

 yet exactly numerable he indeed is, and must be, not confusable with 

 any other, else his professed autonomy, his claim of rights and his 

 sense of duty, can have no significance, must vanish in the universal 

 confusion belonging to the indefinite. Nor, on the other hand, is it at 

 all true that a number has to be a point or an instant, nor that things 

 when numbered and counted are implicitly pinned upon points or, at 

 all events, upon instants. It may well enough be the fact that in our 

 empirical use of number we have to employ Time, or even Space, but 

 it is a gaping non sequitur to conclude that we therefore can count 

 nothing but the placed and the dated. Certainly we count whenever 

 we distinguish, - - by whatever means, on whatever ground. To 

 think is, in general, at least to "distinguish the things that differ;" 

 but this will not avail except we keep account of the differences; 

 hence the One and the Many lie in the very bosom of intelligence, 

 and this fundamental and spontaneous contrast can not only rive 

 Time and Space into expressions of it, in instants and in points, but 

 travels with thought from its start to its goal, and as organic factor 

 in mathematical science does indeed, as Plato in the Republic said, 

 deal with absolute being, if yet dreamwise ; so that One and Many, 



