seems equally difficult. Experience, let us say, does not prove the asserted uniqueness. Then how can thought prove the uniqueness? Only by identifying the presented and segmented Somewhat with a concept; say, the concept of this man or of Socrates, which is such a concept as to forbid any multiple exemplification. But, now, how could one define an idea so as to forbid the defined nature to have multiple exemplification? To define is to specify, but not to individualise. Define a man of such shape, size, colour, eyes, hair, “finger-prints,” feeling, knowledge, and fortune. You have only defined a type. That this type has but one exemplification, you must leave to experience to prove. So far, then, the antinomy seems complete. Thought, as such, cannot define uniqueness, and must appeal to experience; experience, as such, cannot present uniqueness, but must leave that, as being either an intelligible type or nothing, to thought.
It is customary to avoid noticing this difficulty, because one asserts that experience does come to us wholly individualised into experiences of this moment, this place, and so of this desk, this pen, and the rest. I need not here wearily repeat Hegel’s destructive criticism of the concept of the this, merely as the presented fact of what he called “sense-certainty.” It is enough here to observe that the this of passing experience is often and rightly regarded as an individual content; but it is so regarded because one assumes already a previous knowledge of an individual whole, or of a determinate fact, within which, or in relation to which, the this of the passing experience becomes secondarily
