Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic
Georg Hegel · en
Personality thus mingles or unifies in it an universal and an
individual aspect or element: it hints that the universal work always
has in reality an individually-determinate tone,--that nothing in
the world, even if it be called the same, is really and actively
the same. _Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem quod faciunt._ Thus,
what separates personality from individuality is simply that in the
narrower or abstracter use of the latter term there is an absence
of the due subordination of all individuality to universality, and
of all universality to individuality. Personality, in short, is an
individuality which is not a mere freak, not merely different from
other things, but also in itself charged with a universal meaning
or function. Yet even this is not enough to describe it. It is the
individuality of an intelligence: the flesh and blood, and, in a
secondary degree, the outward things, stamped with intelligence.
Every member of a kind, every natural existence, has this double
character; this convergence or union of universal and individual. In
being this individual object, it is at the same time a universal, and
_vice versa._ But in the attribution of personality there is involved
something beyond what is common to all creatures. And that something,
we may first of all say, is this. Whereas in the case of other _things_
the individuality is distinctly subordinate, and each is reckoned
primarily by its kind, in the case of _persons_ we can almost declare
that the universality is subordinate to the individuality. This
union of individuality and universality in a single manifestation,
with the implication that the individuality is the essential and
permanent element to which the universality is almost in the nature
of an accident, is what forms the cardinal point in Personality. And
one can understand, when the distinction is thus put, the obvious and
palpable antagonism in which the view stands to the central principles
of Spinoza[2] We speak of a man as a Personality when we wish to note
the fact that he is no mere manufactured article, the representative
of a common type, with nothing to choose between him and a thousand
others, but that he is, as it were, one of a thousand, one 'Whom
nature printed and then broke the type,' that he has in the highest
sense 'distinction,' the nobility of nature's own patent. Other things
exist, so to speak, for the sake of their kind, and for the sake of
other things; a person, in the strictest sense, is never a mere means
to something beyond, but always at the same time an end in itself
or himself. Other things are mere examples in illustration of a law
that rides superior to them and overrules them: the person is a law
unto himself. He has the royal and divine right of creating law--of
starting by his exception a new law which shall henceforth be a canon
and a standard. For in such a personality when he claims his full
rights there is the visible immanence of the divine and universal--or