124 HUMANISM 



VII 



one, however many of them meet together. But they 

 never do meet in numbers sufficient for a quorum : the 

 attempt to reduce the individuals to universals generates 

 an infinite process, which is never equivalent to the finite 

 individual. 



It is not, then, any logical difficulty which compels 

 us to modify the original sense of the assertion that 

 individuality is an ultimate and definitely determined 

 characteristic of reality, but the general flux of reality 

 itself. The individual also is in process, and so individu 

 ality becomes a characteristic of which reality may be 

 seen to have less or more. The individuality of a drop 

 of water is very evanescent ; the individuality of a 

 schoolboy, or even of a mule, is often found to be a very 

 stubborn fact. Once we have degrees, we can form a 

 standard of individuality ; and the scale may be prolonged 

 inferentially beyond what is actually given. Individuality 

 thereby becomes a hypothesis and an ideal, as well as a 

 characteristic of reality. The atom of physics is such a 

 hypothetical prolongation of the individual in one direction. 

 Monads and the like, are prolongations in another, and, in 

 the writer s opinion, a far more promising, direction. So 

 we can come to say that an individual is lacking in 

 individuality, i.e. shows this universal characteristic of 

 reality too indistinctly, seems to lend himself too easily 

 to explanation by universals, seems to borrow too much 

 from others, and the like. 



But this in nowise trenches upon the value of individu 

 ality. It simply postulates that we must learn to think 

 of the individuality of the real as we have learned to 

 think of its reality, not as a completed being, but as 

 a becoming, i.e. as being a process. That which we 

 designate by the term individuality is a varying and 

 growing quantity, never wholly absent, but not always 

 fully developed. At the one end of the process are the 

 atoms of which we can hardly discern the individuality. 

 At the other end are let us say the angels individuals 

 so perfectly individualised that, as mediaeval doctors 

 taught, each would form a species by himself. 



