show that there is nothing in it. But in criticising the terms of the proposition he thinks he annihilates also the reality beyond it. He is mistaken; for he tramples only on the shadow of his foe. The individual and the real (i.e. the thing symbolized by those symbols of our speech) are not a couple of categories, nor even fully defined concepts. They are just sign-posts, which to a purely thinking mind might convey no meaning, or the contradictory meanings Mr. Ritchie criticises, but which are meant for beings who are real as well as rational. Mr. Ritchie wilfully strips himself of one of his chief means of understanding the world when he abstracts from his own reality, and is then puzzled to find that he must be either nothing or an unknowable thing-in-itself, if he be not a bundle of universal thought-relations. So he comes to the absurd conclusion that he is made up of the products of one of his own activities! Does not this remind one of the hero of Andersen's fairy tale, who became subservient to his shadow? And so it is not surprising that to one who holds that the individual is the real, his polemic (pp. 276–80) should appear a σκιαμαχία, which cannot grasp the logical position of reality, and results only in a series of hystera protera.
For example, the individual is not 'everything which is called one'—things are called one because we attribute to them this extra-logical character of individuality. Nor is the individual what can be expressed by a single term—because the latter is only the nearest logic can get to expressing individuality. The individual is not a spiritual or thinking substance—because the whole category of substance rests upon and is abstracted from the individual, is an attempt thought makes to symbolize a substantivity, which its own adjectivity never properly expresses. The individual is more than a meeting-point of universals, because universals are not individuals, nor able to form 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 individuality 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
