What the fundamental distinction between the supreme individual whole and the lesser individuals must be taken to consist in we shall discuss in our next chapter. Meanwhile we may note two points:—(1) The important thing about an individual is not its mere numerical unity, but its qualitative uniqueness. Any experience which we can pronounce to be individual must be called so, not merely because it is numerically one and not many, but because it is the consistent and harmonious embodiment of a coherent purpose.[purpose.] Numerically considered, every such individual is necessarily many as well as one, precisely because it is a system. This applies especially to the supreme or absolute individual, the complete system of experience. It is individual primarily not because it is numerically one, but because it is the complete expression of a coherent idea or purpose. It has been the defect of too many monistic theories to overlook this, and to lay the main stress on the numerical oneness of the real.
(2) An experience individual in the sense already explained is what we mean by a “spirit.” Spirit cannot be properly defined by contradistinction from a supposed non-spiritual reality, such as “matter,” for such a definition would only amount to the assertion that spirit is what is not other than spirit; and would tell us nothing of the term to be defined. Nor, again, is spirit properly defined as a series of states or modifications of the abstraction “consciousness.” The positive characteristic by which spiritual existence may be recognised is that in it the what and the that are combined in the unity of immediate feeling. And immediate feeling, as we have seen, is essentially teleological. Where you have a connected system of factors which can only be understood as a whole by reference to an explicit or implicit end, which constitutes their unity, you have spirit, and where you have spirit you have such a system. So that to call reality an individual of individuals is the same thing as to say that it is a spiritual system of which the elements, constituents, or terms, are in their turn spiritual systems.[[62]] Our doctrine may thus be seen to be fairly entitled to the name Idealism, which current usage has appropriated to the view that all existence is ultimately mental.
§ 7. Such a relation as we have asserted between the individual whole of Reality and the elements or terms within the whole is necessarily unique, and cannot be adequately illustrated from any less perfect type of systematic unity recognised by everyday or by scientific thought. In particular, we must carefully avoid the mistake of conceiving the relation of the elements to the totality in a mechanical way as that of “parts” to a “whole of parts”; or, again, in a merely biological way, as that of “members” to an organism. All such analogies lose sight of the intimate character of a union in which the elements and the totality exist not merely in and through, but also for each other.
The individual experiences which compose the supreme experience have a genuine, if an imperfect and partial, individuality of their own. They are not in it merely “ideally” or implicitly, as the points on a curve may be said to be in the periphery. And the whole, again, is a real individual, not a mere aggregate in which the parts are real but their unity merely imaginary. We may, if we like, say that it is made up of experiences or minds, but we must not say that it is a collection of minds. For a mere collection, as we have seen, in so far as it is a collection and nothing more, cannot be said to have any genuine individuality, precisely because it has no teleological unity of structure beyond that which we arbitrarily, and with reference to ends lying outside its own nature, impose upon it in the very act of counting its members, i.e. arranging them in serial order. Whether we could properly speak of the absolute whole as a society of minds is a further and a more difficult question. A society is much more than a mere collection: it has a purposive unity of structure which exists not merely for the sociological observer from without, but for its own members as active in assigning to each of them his own special place in relation to all the rest. How far society can be said to have such a unity for itself is a question which we cannot answer until we have dealt more fully with the problem of the relation between selfhood and individuality. And until we have answered it, we must defer the decision as to whether the systematic individuality of the Absolute would be adequately recognised if we thought of it as a society. (See infra, Bk. IV. chap. 3.)
If we are to look at this stage for some analogue within our partial experience for the kind of unity of individuals in a single supreme individual which we have demanded for the system of Reality, we shall probably do best to turn to what is after all the most familiar thing in the world,—our own personal experience. If we consider the nature of any coherent purpose or “mental system,” we shall find that, as the coherent embodiment of a purpose, it possesses a degree of individuality of its own. In proportion to the comprehensiveness, and again to the inner harmony or systematic structure of the interest it embodies, it constitutes a genuine self-existing individual whole of the kind which psychologists recognise as a “self.” And again, in so far as my life exhibits determinate character, so far do these systematic purposes or minor “selves” form a larger system, also individual, which may be called my “total self.” And both the many lesser “selves” and the larger “self” are real in the same sense of the word. Neither exists merely in or for the other; the wider or whole “self” is no mere collection or resultant or product of the more special “selves,” nor are they again mere results of a theoretical process of analysis and abstraction. In so far as they are genuine systems at all, they are not mere “parts” of a whole, but each is the expression, in a concrete conscious life, of the nature of a larger whole from a special “point of view.” The whole, if not equally in every part, is yet as a whole present in every part, and precisely for that reason the category of part and whole is inadequate to express their relation. Somewhat after this fashion we must conceive the structure of any individual whole of lesser individuals. Why, in spite of the analogy, it is desirable not to speak of the whole of Reality as a “Self,” will be made clearer as we proceed.[[63]]
§ 8. The view we have formulated is perhaps more closely akin to Spinoza’s conception of the relation of the human mind to the “infinite intellect of God,” than to any other historically famous theory. According to Spinoza, the individual human mind is an “eternal mode of consciousness which, taken together with all other such ‘modes,’ makes up the infinite intellect of God.” The meaning of the epithet “eternal” we cannot, of course, enter into until we have discussed the relation of the time-process to experience. The rest of the definition pretty clearly coincides in its general sense with the view we have tried to expound of the nature of the relation between the supreme experience and its constituent experiences. For the “modes” of Spinoza are definitely thought of as genuinely individual manifestations of the nature of his ultimate reality, “substance” or “God.” Their individuality and their infinite multiplicity is no result of illusion or illegitimate abstraction. And, on the other hand, “substance” itself is genuinely individual; it is no mere abstract name for the common properties of a number of ultimately independent things.
Most of the adverse criticism which Spinozism has met with, as far at least as regards its doctrine of the nature of the human mind, seems to be based on misapprehension about the first of these points. From his use of the numerical category of whole and part to express the relation between substance and its modes, Spinoza has incorrectly been taken to be denying the fact of the genuine individuality of the finite experience, and therefore to be declaring the very existence of the finite to be mere baseless illusion. With his doctrine as thus misinterpreted, ours has, of course, no similarity. Nothing is explained away by calling it “illusion”; the “illusory” fact is there in spite of the hard names you choose to bestow on it, and demands explanation no less than any other fact. Our theory aims not at dismissing finite individuality as illusion, but at ascertaining what it means, what are its limits, and how it stands related to the complete individual whole of experience which Spinoza calls the infinitus intellectus Dei.[[64]]
The mention of Spinoza will no doubt suggest to the reader the famous doctrine, which has played so large a part in the subsequent development of philosophical Monism, of the double “aspects” or “attributes” of Reality. It is from Spinoza that modern Monism has learned the view that the mental and physical orders are related as two parallel but distinct manifestations of a common underlying reality, so that to every member of one order there corresponds a determinate member of the other. The two are thus everywhere inseparable and everywhere irreducible “parallel” expressions of a nature which is neither mental nor physical. On this fundamental point our theory, as will have been seen already, completely parts company with Spinozism. That the nature of one and the same common whole should be equally manifested in two entirely irreducible forms, is a patent impossibility. Either the unity of the whole or the absolute disparateness of its twin manifestations must be surrendered if we are to think consistently. Hence we cannot avoid asking in which of the two series the assumed common nature is more adequately expressed. According as we answer this question we shall find ourselves led in the end either to thorough-going Materialism or to thorough-going Idealism. For our own part, the perception that Reality is experience and nothing else has already committed us to the view that both of the seemingly disparate series must in the end be mental. Thus our doctrine may be said to be much what Spinoza’s would be if the attribute of “extension” were removed from his scheme, and the whole of Reality identified with the “infinite intellect of God.”[[65]]
Consult further:—B. Bosanquet, Essentials of Logic, lect. 2; Logic, vol. ii. chap. 7; F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chaps. 13, 14, 20; L. T. Hobhouse, Theory of Knowledge, pt. 3, chap. 6, “Reality as a System”; H. Lotze, Metaphysic, bk. i. chap. 6 (Eng. trans., vol. i. pp. 163-191); J. S. Mackenzie, Outlines of Metaphysic, bk. i. chaps. 2, 3; bk. iii. chap. 6; J. E. M‘Taggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, chap. 2.