i] IDEA OF INDIVIDUALITY 11 



is stopped for ever. Even in animals with the most 

 astounding powers of regeneration, the working of 

 the whole is always impaired, if only for a short time, 

 by the removal of a part: some regulation, or re- 

 modelling, is necessary before the mutilated mass is 

 ready to function as a whole once more. Even such 

 an animal is a whole and no mere aggregate : it has 

 an inner principle of unity, which may be loosely fixed 

 and lightly changed, but is none the less real. Our 

 hypothetical homogeneous masses have, in themselves, 

 no inner principle: their definiteness is imposed on 

 them from without, and one feels that if the external 

 conditions altered, they would have none of the 

 independence of our perfect individual, but would 

 alter blindly with the conditions, like raindrops, which 

 in ordinary showers are small, but in a thunderstorm, 

 under the influence of electricity, run together into 

 large heavy drops showing no sign of their composite 

 origin. One can, in fact, consider the working of any 

 portion without the slightest reference to a whole, 

 and it thus becomes evident that nothing homo- 

 geneous can be called an individual. Starting from 

 the just not homogeneous, there can be traced a 

 tendency towards ever greater heterogeneity running 

 up through the series of animal individuals. This 

 was indeed only to be expected. To perfect its 

 independence, the individual, it was seen, had to 

 render its actions precise, independent of each other : 



