the logical uniqueness of the individual to the empirical fact of the separateness of each individual from every other. The result, however, is that the problem really gets no one intelligible answer at all. In the world of sense, one individual, as a matter of fact, is presented as materially — that is, in the end, immediately and inexplicably — different from the other, however much the two may agree in universal type. This flesh, these bones, differentiate Socrates from anybody else. But at once come objections. Is Socrates, as the individual, an intelligible object at all, or is he merely a brute fact of sense? If he is intelligible, then one who knows him, not as a mere man, but as this man, apparently has an idea, i.e. an “intelligible species,” of Socrates as this man. But, in the scholastic theory of knowledge, an idea, or “intelligible species,” is a “form” — in a knower — that is immaterial, and that agrees in type with the type of its object. In other words, an act of knowledge, as I should myself prefer to express it, involves, as such, an imitation of an object in terms of a construction which a knower produces within his own consciousness. But, if this be so, an “imitation,” an “intelligible species,” an “idea” of an object, is, as such, per se universal. One has not to look about in the world of experience to see whether another individual precisely like Socrates ever appears there. If one ever intellectually knows, and not merely sensuously observes, Socrates as this man, then ipso facto the individual type of Socrates has been repeated in the imitative intelligent consciousness of some knower, and this type has no longer a unique exemplification.
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THE CONCEPTION OF GOD
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