the whole universe would mean that one could get outside the whole universe, which is impossible and absurd.
I come now to what may be thought the most formidable objection of all, though an answer to it seems to me to be contained in what has just been said. As all thought has to work with universals, thought, it is urged, never can be adequate to the fulness of Reality. "The individual alone is the real."[1]
Very good; but what is the individual? In what sense are we to take this old Nominalist objection?
(1) Is everything to be called an individual that can be thought of or spoken of as "one"? I have heard of a preacher who wished to prove that all nature testified to Unity a very good thesis but he tried to get at his conclusion by a short cut. "There is one sun, there is one moon, there is one great multitude of stars." The one great multitude of stars, nay, even our one solar system, is only one in the same sense that humanity is one, or a nation is one (though a nation or a solar system is one in a much fuller sense than a mere multitude is). If the individual is identical with the real, it must follow either that the great multitude of stars is an individual or that it is not real. I suppose it would be answered the individual star is real; the collective unity is merely a creation of our thought.
(2) Well, then, is the individual whatever can be expressed by a single term? Popular belief would, I fancy, consider a noun substantive to have more reality about it than an adjective, because the real is thought of as substance rather than as attribute. But if the real is the individual we are limited to singular terms — not the horse, but this horse. But if this horse be allowed to be an individual, what is to be said of this lump of clay ? Is that more an individual than this great multitude of stars? Are we not falling a prey to the popular habit of speaking of every thing as if it were an ultimate reality incapable of analysis? What is any individual thing except a meeting point of universal attributes? Qualities are all universals: are we then to say that they are not real? This would be in strange conflict with what the plain man believes.
- ↑ Cp. Prof. Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, p. 128.
