ideas, in so far as they merely imitate or seek their external Other, ever express what common sense often means by calling that external object an Individual? Or, on the other hand, does the external experience ever, as such, present to us individuals, and show them to us as individuals?[1]
If this question is put simply as an appeal to common sense, the answer will be unhesitating. Who does not know that our knowledge “begins with individual facts?” The child “knows its nurse or its mother or its own playthings first. Only later does it learn the universal characters of things.” The individual, then, is the well known, the familiar, the first in Knowledge and in Being.
This theory, as usually stated, is simply full of inconsequences and inaccuracies that I cannot here undertake to follow out. Of course, what a child first knows are objects that we, with our common-sense metaphysic, call individual things; but there is every evidence that he knows them by virtue of their characters, their qualities, their recognizable, and, for that very reason, abstractly universal features. All animals adjust themselves to the what of their world, and pursue or shun objects because of their odor, taste, color, form, touch-qualities, fashion of movement, — in brief, because of features that are common to many objects and experiences and that, in so far as we can empirically make out, are not, except by accident, confined to an individual being or experience. A
- ↑ I have discussed this point at length in the “Supplementary Essay” of the book called “The Conception of God”. See Part III of that Essay, pp. 217-271.
