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. 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.