of which we obtain our rational assurance that the best is realised, will not be sacrificed for the sake of obtaining room for the exercise of this free variety of will. Professor Howison breaks up the world into many worlds of thought and many spheres of knowledge, merely in order to insure the immediate variety and independence of Will. To do this is to fall into the now exposed fallacy of regarding the category of Individuality as a matter of such a segmentation of contents as would be definable in purely theoretical terms.[1] On the contrary, as we now know, the unity of the world of knowledge presupposes, indeed, the existence of individuality and of Will, but neither the contents of the world of knowledge as immediately felt data, nor the ideas present in that world and fulfilled in the data, can define or present the means by which, or the sense in which, this same world is individuated. Thus the Will individuates according to its own needs; and if it needs for its fulfilment free individuals, it will possess them, and its life will be constituted by theirs; and, while the world of thought and of fact will present nothing that conflicts with such individuation, its unity will no more be thereby broken into fragments of knowledge and experience than, to refer to Schopenhauer’s well-known metaphor, the sunlight is shattered by the various winds that blow through it.
- ↑ [Professor Howison also holds that this way of regarding the category of Individuality is fallacious. But he denies that a plurality of minds, each a centre of genuine origination both as to thought and as to conduct, involves this fallacy. — Ed.]
