Scotus well insisted, must certainly mean more than an inclinatio toward this flesh and these bones; or, as we should say, must mean more than mere constancy of “visceral and muscular sensations.” Moreover, there are the angels, who are individuals, and who, for themselves, are through and through intelligible and intelligent. All these problematic facts of the scholastic world are but illustrations of the universal issue which we must all somehow face. I use the scholastic examples only as such illustrations. “De te fabula,” we say to anybody who is disposed to smile at the tangles. “You believe that you know individuals as such. Then just such problems are for you.” Meanwhile, Thomas has to admit that, in itself, if not for us, individuality, as such, must in view of these considerations depend upon some intelligible principle of differentiation, which somehow gets applied to the ideal nature of the universe, and which so, in the end, formally individuates. Scotus, in the last analysis, asserts no more. For Scotus, the hæcceitas is a positive individual character, essentially ideal and intelligible. And yet Thomas is right in his instinct that intelligible individuality, in so far forth as intelligible, seems at once, on the other hand, to involve principles that, as ideal, are universal, and that therefore, when applied, will explain only classes or types of objects, and never uniqueness. Why not another case of this hæcceitas if the hæcceitas is ideal and intelligible?
The special arguments of Scotus now hardly need here further analysis. The real point of the Subtle Doctor, I take it, is that you never can rest content in
