ABSTRACT universal User Manual download pdf (Page 8)

even being ‘now’ and ‘here’ does not make a temporal or spatial instant

unique and thus purely individual, for there are always further instants that

are ‘now’ and ‘here’ in the same way, so that particular ‘nows’ and ‘heres’

have been shown to be instances of universals in this fairly standard sense.

Thus, whether or not we think it is right to attribute to the British Idealists the

view that ‘the individual, qua individual, is a universal’ in any strong sense, we

might accept that this view is highly problematic, and also can oﬀer us few

interpretative insights into Hegel’s position; for it seems we must admit (and

that Hegel would agree) that it takes more to be a concrete universal than to be

a uniﬁed diversity, for the uniﬁed diversity of an individual (such as Julius

Caesar) surely does not make that individual a universal of any type, but

merely a substance with attributes, or a whole with parts. On the other hand, if

all the doctrine of the concrete universal amounts to is the claim that ‘you may

call’ an individual a universal as a way of ‘emphasizing’ its unity-in-diversity,

then it this may suggest it is in fact a rather trivial position.

However, it would be premature to abandon all interest in the doctrine of

the concret e universal straightaway, as there is more to the British Idealists’s

discussion than this, where they came to conceive of the concrete universal

as a particular type of universal: ‘the universal in the form of a world’, as

Bosanquet put it,

rather than in the form of a class. By the ‘the universal in

the form of a world’, Bosanquet meant that individuals which exemplify this

universal are thereby related with one another in a system of mutual

interdependence, whereas individuals that merely belong to the same class

are not. Josiah Royce (not of course, strictly a British Idealist, but none-

theless greatly inﬂuenced by them) puts this idea as follows :

This universal is no abstraction at all, but a perfectly concrete whole, since the

facts are, one and all, not mere examples of it, but are embraced in it, are

brought forth by it as its moments, and exist only in relation to one another

and to it. It is the vine; they, the individuals, are the branches.

For a reading that is also critical of Soll’s account for claiming that Hegel (like the British

Idealists) ‘has clumsily conﬂated universals . . . with complex individuals’, but on somewhat

diﬀerent grounds, see Edward Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford, 1987)

211–12.

Bernard Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (London, 1912) 38.

Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston, 1892) 224. Cf. also Edward Caird,

Social Philosophy of Auguste Comte (Glasgow, 1885) 109 (incorrectly cited by Royce, 499, n1):

‘The universal of science and philosophy is . . . not merely a generic name, under which things are

brought together, but a principle which unites them and determines their relation to each other’;

and also John Caird (Edward Caird’s brother), who Royce also cites extensively:

But thought is capable of another and deeper movement. It can rise to a universality

which is not foreign to, but the very inward nature of things in themselves, not the

122 ROBERT STERN

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