What is the principle that individuates the world? we are fain to conceal our uncertainty behind a mere repetition of the assertion that individuals are facts.
I cannot but think that the bare assertion of the actuality of individuals, without a prior and general consideration of the whole problem of the category of Individuality, is responsible for much of the difference that appears to exist between Professor Howison’s Ethical Individualism and the Idealistic Monism which he combats. The antinomy referred to at the outset of the present paper has appeared thus far as an antinomy between the claims of theory and the presuppositions of ethics. The theoretical need can only be met by the world where all facts are present in the unity of the Absolute Consciousness. To this Professor Howison replies, that the dignity of the ethical individual demands the real variety and separate existence of the citizens of the “City of God.” But the citizens of this City, if they exist, are not merely ethical but logical individuals, and the question, What is an individual? applies to them as well as to the humblest conceivable individual object. Suppose the answer to this question should involve the perfectly universal assertion, that on the one hand the theoretical view itself, in order to attain its completion in the apprehension of the universe as one Whole, is obliged to make use of the category of Individuality. Suppose that it should then appear that this category is essentially indefinable in purely theoretical terms, — that, in other words, as we have already said, the presence of individuality is essentially an expression of the divine Will. Then at
