32. THE “PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUATION”.—How, then, are we to conceive this something which individuates reality? It may be well to point out that for the erroneous doctrine of extreme realism, which issues in monism, the problem of individuation, as here understood, does not arise. For the monist all plurality in being is merely apparent, not real: there can be no question of a real distinction between individual and individual.(145) Similarly, the nominalist and the conceptualist evade the problem. For these the individual alone is not merely formally real: it alone is fundamentally real: the universal is not even fundamentally real, has no foundation in reality, and thus all scientific knowledge of reality as revealed in sense experience is rendered impossible. But for the moderate realist, while the individual alone is formally real, the universal is fundamentally real, and hence the problem arises. It may be forcibly stated in the form of a paradox: That whereby Socrates and Plato are really distinct from each other as individuals is really identical with the human nature which is really in both. But what individuates human nature in Socrates, or in Plato, is logically distinct from the human nature that is really in Socrates, and really in Plato. We have only to inquire, therefore, whether the intrinsic principle of individuation is to be conceived merely as a negation, as something negative added by the mind to the concept of the specific nature, whereby the latter is apprehended as incapable of multiplication into “others” each of which would be formally that same nature, or, in other words, as incommunicable; or is the intrinsic ground of this incommunicability to be conceived as something positive, not indeed as something really distinct from, and superadded to, the specific nature, but as a positive aspect of the latter, an aspect, moreover, not involved in the concept of the specific nature considered in the abstract.