child’s early vagueness in applying names, his “calling of all men and women fathers and mothers,”[1] as Aristotle already observed, shows that our primary consciousness is of the vaguely universal.
And now, not only is this true as to the genesis of our knowledge, but, to the end, it remains true of us mortals that, Neither do our internal meanings ever present to us, nor yet do our external experiences ever produce before us, for our inspection, an object whose individuality we ever really know as such. Neither internal meanings nor external meanings, in their isolation, are in the least adequate to embody individuality.
For an individual is unique. There is no other of its individual kind. If Socrates is an individual, then there is only one Socrates in the universe. If you are an individual, then in Reality there is no other precisely capable of taking your place. If God is an individual, then, as ethical monotheism began by saying, There is no Other.
Now, by taking note in thought of this supposed uniqueness, you can, of course, in general, define, as a sort of problem to be solved by real Beings, the ideal and abstract nature of individuality itself. But then, you do not, in that case, tell what constitutes any one individual such as he is. But now change the statement of the problem. Try to define, in idea, some one individual, real or fictitious, e.g. Achilles, or Socrates, or the universe. At once, when you define, your idea, as an internal meaning, presents to you a combination of characters such as, according to your definition, some Other, i.e. some object external to the idea, might embody. In consequence,
- ↑ Aristotle, Phys., Bk. I, 1.
