as its ideal fulfilment. How should the presentation become contradictory by merely showing what the consistent definition had called for? And now in no other sense is the series, as presented, complete, than in the one sense of showing, in the supposed experience, all of its own ideally defined members. It is not complete in having any closing term.
Your reply to this statement will doubtless at last appeal to the decisive consideration regarding the nature of any individual fact of Being. You will say: “But the determinate presentation of a series of facts involves precisely that sort of completion of the series which makes it possess a last member. For the series, if given, is an Individual Whole, presented as such a complex individual in experience; and as an individual, the series needs precise limits. As it has a first, so then, if completely individuated, it must be finished by a last member. Otherwise it would lack the determination necessary to distinguish an Individual Being from a general idea.”[1]
If the objection be thus stated, it raises afresh the whole question: What is an individual fact of experience? What is an individual whole in experience? Now I have set forth in the foregoing lectures (see Lectures VII and X), and have still more minutely developed elsewhere,[2] a thesis about individuality whose relative novelty in the discussion of that topic, and whose special importance with regard to the issue about the determinateness of the Infinite, I must here insist upon. That every individual Being is determinate, I fully maintain. But how and upon what basis does such determination rest? When, and upon what ground, could one say: I have seen an individual whole? Never, I must insist, upon the ground that one has seen a group of facts with a sharply marked boundary, or with a definite localization in space or in time,
- ↑ Here, as I believe, is the deepest ground for that Aristotelian objection to the Infinite as “no totality,” which we have now so often met. The whole question, then, is as to the true essence of Individuality.
- ↑ Conception of God, Part III of the Supplementary Essay of that work. See also ibid, p. 331: “Chasms do not individuate.”
