the unity of its own experience. This unity of its own experience is that individual existing formally. We must also enquire how it enters into the ‘formal’ existence of other things; and this entrance is that individual existing objectively, that is to say—existing abstractly, exemplifying only some elements in its formal content.
With this conception of the world, in speaking of any actual individual, such as a human being, we must mean that man in one occasion of his experience. Such an occasion, or act, is complex and therefore capable of analysis into phases and other components. It is the most concrete actual entity, and the life of man from birth to death is a historic route of such occasions. These concrete moments are bound together into one society by a partial identity of form, and by the peculiarly full summation of its predecessors which each moment of the life-history gathers into itself. The man-at-one-moment concentrates in himself the colour of his own past, and he is the issue of it. The ‘man in his whole life history’ is an abstraction compared to the ‘man in one such moment.’ There are therefore three different meanings for the notion of a particular man,—Julius Cæsar, for example. The word ‘Cæsar’ may mean ‘Cæsar in
