MY purpose in the present Lecture is not, as in the two preceding, to examine the past history of the word Person, but to ascertain the meaning which it now bears for us by trying to answer the question how we should distinguish the conception for which it stands from certain others to which it would seem to be closely related. With this end in view we shall find it convenient to orientate ourselves, as it were, by taking as our starting-point a provisional definition; and I know of none better adapted to this purpose than that old one attributed to Boethius, to which in my survey of the word's history I have already so often referred: Persona est naturæ rationabilis individua substantia. It would be generally allowed, I think, that by a person we mean a rational individual, or, if we prefer to put it so, a concrete individual mind. I have chosen this latter phrase as leaving open an alternative of which many would embrace one side and many the other. If we think that, in order to be concrete—that is, to exist upon its own account and not as a mere characteristic or attribute of something so existing—a mind must be embodied, then we shall think that a person must be an embodied mind; if, on the other hand, we think that a mind can thus exist upon its own account unembodied then we shall think that a person need not have a body. Thus those who are persuaded that the departed after the dissolution of their bodies continue to exercise mental activities undoubtedly regard these discarnate spirits as persons, and as the same persons that they were when we knew them in the body.

It may, indeed, be noted here in passing that some who have believed that individual souls survive the dissolution of the body have held that a disembodied spirit is not a complete person, so that only when soul and body have been reunited at the resurrection is the personality to be restored which was suspended at death. This is, for example, the view of St. Thomas Aquinas.1 Nevertheless it would probably be true to say that those who maintain this view think of the life of the disembodied soul after death as a personal life and are ready (e.g. in their invocation of the saints) to address them as persons.

I am of course aware that to some the very admission of the possibility that a mind, personal or other, could exist apart from a body will seem to involve so groundless and improbable an assumption as to put any one who makes it out of court. I hope in the second series of these Gifford Lectures to take an opportunity of describing more fully my attitude towards the problem of the relation of Personality to what may be variously regarded as its physical basis, condition, expression, or vehicle. But for the present I shall content myself with the following observations. In view of the fact that, within that part of our experience which no one regards as illusory, Personality is normally associated with a material organism, we are, I think, bound to ask ourselves whether there may not be grounds for supposing this association to be necessary in every case. But I do not think that the grounds which may be alleged in support of this supposition are so overwhelmingly strong as to make the counter-hypothesis unworthy of consideration by reasonable men, and I therefore hold myself justified in adopting at this stage a description or provisional definition of Personality which leaves the question open.

A person, then, is, by our definition, individual; but it would usually be held that not all individuals are persons. That it is no easy matter to say what we mean by an individual will not be disputed by any one who recollects the controversies which have been carried on in the schools of philosophy about the principium individuationis, the principle of individuality, or the notorious difficulty which biologists have found in deciding what constitutes an individual organism. The remarks which I am about to offer for your consideration have no aim so ambitious as would be that of attempting to solve these celebrated problems. They will do little more than indicate some outstanding facts as to the use of the word ‘individual’ as well in common speech as by philosophers, especially in relation to and in distinction from the word ‘person.’

‘Atom’ and ‘individual’ represent the same Greek word; but the former (when used with any strictness) is usually taken to imply an impossibility of physical, the latter an impossibility of logical division. Thus there is nothing in the traditional way of using the word ‘individual’ which is inconsistent with admitting that an individual may be composite in origin, or susceptible of disruption into several individuals; but these then would not be instances of the original individual, they would only be several individuals, whether of the same or of any other kind from the first, taking the place of one which had ceased to exist. Nor is there anything to prevent an individual being made up of distinguishable individuals of a different kind—e.g. an individual nation of individual men, or an individual organism of individual cells, or an individual river of individual drops of water.

The general term ‘man’ is not the name of an individual, because there are many men, each of whom is a man; but ‘Socrates’ is the name of an individual because there are not and cannot be in this way several Socrateses, each of whom is a Socrates. Of course there may be several men called Socrates, but they do not constitute a class characterized by participation in a common ‘Socrateitas,’ as the Latin Schoolmen said, of which each would afford an instance. In the technical language of elementary logic it is only equivocally that the name is applied at once to the philosopher and to the ecclesiastical historian.

A ‘person’ is by our definition not only an individual but an individual substance. That is, we should not call anything which exists only as an attribute of something else a person, in the sense we are now trying to fix. No doubt there are senses of the word ‘person,’ and those earlier senses than the one we are studying, in which it signifies something which is not a substance but an accident—for example, an assumed character or a legal qualification. But in the sense in which ‘person’ is equated with ὑπόστασις a person must be a substance, not an attribute, and moreover an individual substance. For a personal name, such as Socrates, is not the name of a kind of substance, whereof there may be many instances, but of an individual substance of which there can be no instances. Here a certain temptation to sophistry offers itself, which we shall do well to note as we pass and so to avoid yielding to it. ‘Person’ itself (it may be objected) is after all a common term; it is therefore the name of a kind of substance and applies to many such substances. I am a person as I am a man, or a lecturer, an instance of the universal ‘person’ of which every one of my hearers is an instance too. And on the other hand a man or a lecturer no less than a person must be an individual substance. Is there anything to distinguish ‘person’ in this respect from such other appellations as I have mentioned? I am of course assuming that by ‘person’ we mean a rational individual or an individual mind. If person were a mere synonym for ‘human being,’ of course it would be a common or general term like any other, but I think that it is not usually employed as a mere synonym for ‘human being,’ and that we could not substitute it for this latter term on all occasions, but only in certain special contexts.

Now if everything real is individual, and if every description (as distinct from a mere designation) of a thing must be in general terms, it follows that, unless we carefully bear this in mind, we shall be at the mercy of any sophist who says either that, since we can only know what is real, there must exist an individual corresponding to every description that embodies knowledge, or that, since every description must be in general terms, what is described must always be what logicians call a ‘universal.’ The former type of sophism has been so often discussed that we are more likely to be on our guard against it than against its fellow. It may take the form either of ascribing an individual existence to a universal in abstraction from its particular instances, or of denying to the universal the common nature or character which individuals share, any reality except as a name on our lips or a thought in our minds. I need not dwell on the difficulties into which such views must bring us; they are sufficiently indicated by a reference on the one hand to the celebrated argument of the ‘third man’ brought in antiquity against a crude statement of the Platonic theory of Ideas2; and on the other to the question which Plato represents Parmenides as asking of the young Socrates when the latter had suggested that the universal was perhaps a notion in the soul: ‘Is it a notion of nothing?’3

But the fellow-sophism to this is, as I said, less familiar and therefore perhaps more dangerous. I will therefore deal with it at somewhat greater length.

Just as there is a temptation to take that which is not individual either for an individual or for a figment, so there is an opposite temptation to treat that which is individual, because described in general terms, as a universal. And we may yield to this temptation, as to the one before mentioned, in two distinct ways. We may point out that such words as ‘individual,’ ‘person,’ ‘self’ and so forth are themselves common predicates; that as Socrates and Plato are alike men, the one no more or no less than the other, so they are both alike individuals and persons and selves. Thence we may be induced to attempt a short cut to idealism, by way of the reflection that the object of knowledge turns out on inspection at close quarters to be nothing but thoughts; since universals, if not mere thoughts of yours or mine, at least exist as such only in the medium of thought. This short cut is not unfamiliar to students of philosophy—I will admit that I once thought it would take me whither I wanted to go—but I am convinced that he who trusts himself to it will have cause to remember the proverb ‘More haste less speed.’ This is one form of our sophism. The other is this: We ask what seems more undeniably real, substantial, impenetrable than the individual, and in particular than the individual that each of us knows most intimately, I myself. Yet you call yourself I as justly as I do; self means you just as well as me: and in the end ‘self’ will turn out to me a mere appearance, like the gleam upon the water or the rainbow's end which shifts “for ever and for ever when” we “move,”4 so that we can never come up with it and grasp the bright thing which to a child's inexperienced eyes it seems so easy to suppose that we shall reach, if we do but walk steadily forward in a certain direction.

It is no part of my intention in these remarks, as some of my hearers may perhaps suspect, to suggest that there is some being inaccessible to thought; still less that in such an impenetrable shrine is concealed what is of highest and most enduring worth. Such a view would be entirely alien to my own way of thinking. However imperfect what we call our knowledge may be, I should contend that it is, so far as it goes, an apprehension of Reality; not merely an apprehension of something with which Reality puts us off, as it were, while remaining in itself inaccessible to us. No doubt we may often find ourselves in presence of something which we cannot describe, because the description of it would exceed our actual powers of comprehension and expression; but the mere fact that we can say nothing about a thing does not for me imply that it passes all understanding; it may be only that there is nothing about it to say.

It was not, then, because I wished to insinuate a doctrine of the Unknowable that I spoke of the necessity of guarding against the sophism which would turn the individual into a universal no less than against that other sophism, with the exposure of which we are all familiar, which turns the universal into an individual. It was rather because I desired to insist that reality is throughout individual and universal; not in part one and in part the other; but both alike throughout and at every point. In words of Goethe which Hegel quotes to emphasize this truth:—

Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale,

Alles ist sie mit einem male.

Nature has neither kernel nor shell,

She is all at once one and the other as well!5

Everything that is real, then, is unique, this thing and no other. But just because it is thus unique, it fills a place of its own in a system of Reality in which it has its being; it is describable by way of relation to and distinction from other things, other elements in that Reality: so that a full description of it would state its relation to and its distinction from every other such element or part of the whole. This double aspect which belongs to all that is real is manifested most conspicuously and unmistakably in persons. The person, the rational individual, is not only recognized by others, but recognizes himself as unique and individual, just because he is aware of something beyond himself, however vaguely conceived, a background against which he himself is, as it were, set alongside with what is not himself; an encompassing world within which he and other things from which he distinguishes himself are alike included. This background or encompassing world is potentially infinite since, however we may attempt to envisage or picture or describe it, as soon as it is thus envisaged or pictured or described it is at once found to be itself embraced within something yet more comprehensive, and so on for ever. We may see this truth illustrated by all those myths of the origin or creation of the world which tell of a transaction requiring a world already made in which it could take place, and so provoke the further question, Whence came the beings or things, whatever they may be, which are represented as taking part in the transaction? a question which in its turn leads on to some further story and yet further question, in a series to which only the exhaustion of the myth-maker's fancy can set a period.

At this point a question of some importance suggests itself for consideration. When we say that the double aspect of all that is real is most unmistakably manifested in persons, which are individuals conscious of themselves as such, is this because the individuality of persons is an individuality more perfect than that of individuals which are not persons, or only because here and here only is there revealed to us who are persons what is in fact the true and inward nature of all individuals whatsoever?

With regard to this question I shall here content myself with a reference to the doctrine of Leibnitz. It is well known that in the view of this philosopher the reality of the world consists in an infinite multitude of ‘monads’ or individual substances which, as he picturesquely put it, “have no windows”—that is to say, admitted no influences from without; so that all that is done by, or happens to, any monad is part of the necessary development of its own nature; although among all these coexistent lines of development there is what he called a pre-established harmony, the effects of which we are apt to mistake for the effects of mutual interaction among the monads.6 It is not, however, of the ‘windowlessness’ of the monads or of their ‘pre-established harmony’ that I wish to remind you now. It is rather of the fact that, although Leibnitz, while considering all souls to be monads, did not consider all monads to be entitled to the designation of souls, yet it was undoubtedly the personal soul as apprehended by itself that served him as his starting-point in construing the nature of the monads. That there could be beings possessing the genuine individuality which the personal soul attributes to itself and yet not exhibiting that consciousness which is the characteristic activity of the personal soul—this became intelligible to him by means of the experience which the soul has of the continuity of its own development through and across periods of sub consciousness and unconsciousness, during its continuance in which we can attribute to it no activity but that of petites perceptions7 which do not rise, in the metaphorical phrase familiar to us in modern psychology, above the threshold of consciousness. I think we may borrow from Leibnitz here an answer to the question upon which I have just touched. What the personal soul is conscious of being in itself, this it is conscious of being because it is it to a certain degree of perfection; were other individuals this to the same degree, they would be also conscious of being it, and so would be self-conscious individuals or persons. There is, then, a genuine identity between the individuality which is self-conscious and which we call personal and that which we, who are persons, recognize in other things to which we do not give the name of ‘persons.’ It is that kind of identity to which we give the name of development or evolution; where we recognize the same nature or type under a succession or series of forms so related that each exhibits the nature or type in question more adequately than its predecessor.

Individuality from the first is characterized by independence—relative independence at least—of other individuals; but, as it appears to us in things, we find ourselves in every case tempted to ask whether it is not something which we are attributing to them, which is defined by our purposes only, and which another spectator might define quite otherwise. We desire to correct our view of it by a view of it which shall be the thing's own; but this, just because the thing is not conscious, and therefore has no view of itself, we cannot do. In the case of organisms which we should not dignify by the name of persons we find something more like what we are looking for; but it does not satisfy us; for, as the individuality of the mere thing seemed to need in order to determine it a mind which it did not itself possess, so does even that of the organism. For although in its action and (in the case of animals) in its feeling it affords a principle of determination other than our purposes, it still does not determine itself as we determine our own individuality by our own self-consciousness. In the case of a person, the individual may be said to determine himself by his thought of himself. If even here the principle which has guided us so far does not seem to be completely realized; if we are liable to self-distractions out of which we can only imperfectly recover ourselves by the effort of self-consciousness; if our power of grasping in thought what we are seems limited on the one side by physical conditions, which we find already given, and on the other by an ideal of which we are conscious that we fall short—all this is only to say that such ‘personality’ as ours is not the highest form of individuality possible, although higher than any we attribute to beast or plant or inanimate body. Our inquiries have brought us up against a controversy intimately connected with our main subject in this course of Lectures, a controversy on the terminology of which I have already commented, but the further examination of which I expressly postponed. I refer to the difference between Mr. Bosanquet and Lotze which is expressed by the former's ascription of Individuality and denial of Personality to the Absolute, as contrasted with the assertion of the latter that Personality belongs unconditionally only to the Infinite.8

Let me before going further take note of an historical circumstance which may prove of some use to us as a guide-post in the mazes of the inquiry upon which we are entering. Most readers of the two philosophers I have named, Lotze and Mr. Bosanquet, if suddenly asked which of the two stood nearer in this matter of the individuality and personality of the Absolute Reality to the position of historical Christianity, would probably reply without hesitation that it was Lotze. I do not say that we may not ultimately see reason to endorse this opinion. But at first sight we may well hesitate to do so.

For, so far as the terminology goes, it is not Lotze but Mr. Bosanquet that agrees with the tradition of Christian theology in calling God an individual but not a person9: that God is individual in the logical sense, as man (for example) is not, so that there cannot be several individuals who are all alike Gods as there are many individuals who are all alike men; as also in the sense that there cannot be said to be any act of his in which only a part of him is concerned—this would be affirmed by any accurate exponent of Christian doctrine. And, as we saw in the third Lecture, the personality of God (as distinct from the acknowledgment of persons in God) is affirmed by no Christian creed or confession of faith which has not so far departed from the normal type as to abandon the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity.

No doubt Mr. Bosanquet and Mr. Bradley also have been at pains to make clear that they do not consider the Absolute to be another name for God.10 The God of religion, they say, is or may be thought of as standing in a personal relation to his worshipper; and they would, I think, be inclined to add that there are aspects of Reality which of course fall within the Absolute but are ignored by religion or, if not ignored, are regarded by it as antagonistic to God. We shall have to return to the question of the relation of these two conceptions, God and the Absolute. But for the present I do not think it affects what I have said above about Mr. Bosanquet's agreement with Christian theology. For he would probably be quite ready to concede that in the theologians' account of the Trinity in Unity we have less a description of God as the Christian worshipper conceives him in the actual practice of his religion than a description of a philosophical speculation (though one no doubt suggested by the history of religious experience within the Christian Church) concerning the nature of the Supreme Reality or, in Mr. Bosanquet's own terminology, of the Absolute.

What is it, then, we may ask in the respective views of Lotze and of Mr. Bosanquet which causes this closer agreement of the latter than of the former with the traditional theology of Christendom to strike one as something which one would not have expected? The answer to this question will, I think, throw light upon that conception of Personality the application of which to God, the Supreme Reality, we have proposed to ourselves to discuss.

For this answer is to be found in the ethical implications of this conception of Personality: and of these we have not as yet spoken, except incidentally.

Now in the first place, if we cast back our thoughts to that history of the word person which I traced in a previous Lecture, we shall see that the original associations of the word were with the performance of functions in social intercourse. We see this alike in the case of the persons in a drama and the persons at law who are the subjects of rights and duties. We do not wonder, then, that the thought of Personality cannot easily be disconnected from that of social conduct or, in other words, from the sphere of Morality.

We shall, I think, bring this fact home to ourselves if we raise the question whether a self-conscious individual supposed to stand altogether outside that sphere could naturally be called a person. Let us take two instances to illustrate what I mean: one from a contemporary novelist, the other from an ancient philosopher.

The adventurous fancy of Mr. Wells has, in the ‘Martians’ of his romance The War of the Worlds, familiarized his readers with the picture of a rational and scientific animal who is imagined as sharing the intellectual but not the moral nature of mankind. A stranger to the desires and pleasures of sex and of nutrition, the Martian is equally a stranger to the moral emotions which, in their simplest and most universal shape, are connected with the satisfaction of those desires and the enjoyment of those pleasures.

Now we may not unreasonably doubt whether, if the Martians were wholly without morality, they could have organized the invasion of this planet which is the theme of Mr. Wells's story. That there must be ‘honour among thieves’ if they are to form successful gangs, is the familiar teaching both of proverbial philosophy and of the Republic of Plato.11 And the same line of thought would suggest that Mr. Wells's Martians must after all have had at least those rudiments of a moral sense which were necessary to ensure their efficient co-operation.

But, however this may be, I think that we should in speaking of one of the Martians as described by Mr. Wells hesitate to call him—or it—a person. For with such a being what we call personal relations would be impossible for us; and it is by the possibility of such relations that we judge of the presence of personality in others. It is just what constitutes the nightmare-like ghastliness of these creatures of Mr. Wells's imagination that they have some of the attributes we associate most closely with personality, and yet, for lack of that moral community with us which makes personal relations possible are not really persons. The horror which they inspire is an intensified degree of that which in real life is excited in us by the maniac who has not indeed, like the fabled Martians, the intellectual capacity of a human being, but at any rate presents (as they do not) the outward form of man, and yet not withal the opportunity of human fellowship which that form seems to promise. And the maniac it would certainly seem unnatural to describe, except with some apology, as a person.

To my other—very different—instance of a self-conscious individual who is thought of as standing outside of the sphere of morality I have already referred in an earlier Lecture12; and so I will do no more now than mention it. It is God as described by Aristotle. To God, according to the express statements of that philosopher, ethical predicates are inapplicable. He enters into no reciprocal relations with other beings, although the desire to attain to his supreme excellence is the cause of the movement of universal nature; for he himself, by reason of his very perfection, can have no concern with or knowledge of anything that is less perfect than himself—and all things except himself are that.

We saw before that such a being is not at all what those who attach importance to the recognition of a ‘personal God’ are thinking of when they use that phrase: for since there is no possibility of personal relations with him, he is not in any natural sense a person, any more than the maniac or the Martian. The denial of personality is in these three very various cases based upon the same negation which may be made about them all, namely that they are outside the sphere of morality, which is the sphere of personal relations; so that personal relations with them there cannot be and persons they cannot properly be called.

Now the Absolute of Mr. Bosanquet's and of Mr. Bradley's philosophy also transcends the sphere of Morality, although in a somewhat different sense from the God of Aristotle. For in the view of Mr. Bosanquet and Mr. Bradley the moral life of human beings and of any other beings (if such there be) who progress from a more imperfect to a more perfect state of existence under the impulse of aspiration after an ideal which is not yet realized, does not fall altogether outside of the Absolute Experience; on the contrary, it is wholly comprehended within it, although only as transmuted, one may say, beyond all recognition. For, whereas Morality is unfulfilled aspiration, we have here satisfied fruition.13 And whereas Morality involves external relations to other beings to whom the moral person owes duties, and from whom he claims rights, there is nothing beyond the Absolute. Thus in this philosophy the Absolute transcends the sphere of Morality, and therefore cannot be called a Person.

On the other hand, Lotze does not deny Personality to the Infinite because he holds that what we are compelled to regard as the highest conceptions, of which conceptions the Good (that is, the morally good) is one, lose all reality and become empty abstractions except as referred to a Person; while to him the description of the Supreme Reality as a “Living Love that wills the blessedness of others,”14 does not, as to the English thinkers with whom I have contrasted him, appear inconsistent with that freedom from all want or dependence which must belong to that Supreme Reality. Rather, so he thinks, it satisfies a deep-seated demand in our nature to find that what has supreme reality has also supreme value; and this he would certainly have refused to find in an Absolute like Mr. Bosanquet's, our conception of which is reached by the application of a criterion the “proper name” of which is non-contradiction.15 For the present we will bring to a close this account of the difference between Lotze on the one hand and Mr. Bosanquet on the other which expresses itself in the attribution to the Ultimate Reality of Personality by the former, and by the latter of Individuality but not of Personality. We have compared with both a third view, namely, that embodied in the traditional theology of Christendom. This theology agreed, as we saw, with Mr. Bosanquet as against Lotze in affirming individuality but not personality of the Supreme Being: and in finding Personality included within the nature of the Supreme Being, but not predicable of it. On the other hand, Lotze is at one with this same theology in his teaching, which Mr. Bosanquet would be unable to endorse as it stands, that the Supreme Being is a “Living Love that wills the blessedness of others,” although he does not carry his agreement so far as to represent this will to bless others as rooted in an eternal activity of love between persons who are not other than the Supreme Being, because their distinction from one another falls within its unity, and yet are not (like the persons who in Mr. Bosanquet's doctrine also fall within the unity of his Absolute) transitory and finite manifestations of an eternal and infinite Reality.

On the problems suggested by the comparison and contrast of these views there remains of course much to be said: and I hope to return to them hereafter. But what I have said will perhaps be sufficient for our immediate purpose, which was only to illustrate the distinction of the notion of personality from that of individuality and the relation of the one to the other.

In the next Lecture I shall pass to the distinction of the notion of personality from and its relation to another, to which as well as to individuality, of which we have just been speaking, reference is made in the Boethian definition of person, namely the notion of rationality.