29. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE UNIVERSAL.—We have distinguished transcendental unity into individual and universal (27, _c_). Reality as endowed with universal unity is reality as apprehended by abstract thought to be capable of indefinite repetition or multiplication of itself in actual existence. Reality as endowed with individual unity is reality apprehended as actually existing, or as proximately capable of actually existing, and as therefore incapable of any repetition or multiplication of itself, of any division of itself into other “selves” or communication of itself to other “selves”. While, therefore, the universal has its reality only in the individuals to which it communicates itself, and which thus embody it, the individual has its reality in itself and of its own right, so to speak: when it actually exists it is “_sui juris_,” and as such incommunicable, “_incommunicabilis_”. The actually existing individual is called in Latin a “_suppositum_”—a term which we shall render by the English “thing” or “individual thing”. It was called by Aristotle the οὐσία πρωτή, _substantia prima_, “first substance,” or “first essence,” to distinguish it from the substance or essence conceived by abstract thought as universal; the latter being designated as οὐσία δέυτερα, _substantia secunda_, “second substance” or “second essence”. Now it is a fundamental assumption in Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy that whatever actually exists, or whatever is real in the sense that as such it is proximately capable of actual existence, is and must be individual: that the universal as such is not real, _i.e._ as such cannot actually exist. And the manifest reason for this assumption is that whatever actually exists must be, with entire definiteness and determinateness, its own self and nothing else: it cannot be capable of division or repetition of itself, of that which it really is, into “other” realities which would still be “that individual thing”. But reality considered as universal _is_ capable of such repetition of itself indefinitely. Therefore reality cannot actually exist as universal, but only as individual. This is merely plain common sense; nor does the idealistic monism which appears to attribute reality to the universal as such, and which interprets reality exclusively according to the forms in which it presents itself to abstract thought, really run counter to this consideration; for what it really holds is not that universals as such are real, but that they are phases of the all-one reality which is itself _one individual being_.