But many modern philosophers hold that individuality, no less than universality, is a form of thought. No doubt “individuality” _in the abstract_ is, no less than universality, an object abstracted from the data of experience by the mind’s analysis of the latter. But this is not what those philosophers mean. They mean that the individual as such is not a real datum of experience. From the Kantian view that individuality is a purely mental form with which the mind invests the datum, they draw the subjectivist conclusion that the world, thus interpreted as consisting of “individuals,” is a phenomenal or mental product for the objective validity of which there can be to man’s speculative reason no sufficient guarantee. To this theory we oppose that of Aristotle and the scholastics, not merely that the individual alone is actually existent, but that as actually existent and as individual it is actually given to us and apprehended by us in internal and external sense experience; and that although in the inorganic world, and to some extent in the lower forms of life, we may not be able to determine for certain what portions of this experience are distinct individuals, still in the world of living things generally, and especially of the animal kingdom, there can be no difficulty in determining this, for the simple reason that here reality is given to us in sense experience as consisting of distinct individuals.