One of the most attractive of the ideas Hopkins developed, from Duns Scotus, is haecceity. Each thing has a whatness (quiddity - "I am a human being") and a thisness (haecceity - "I am Ross Hornsby"). In the deistic and agnostic conceptions of reality, God or the laws of physics "wind the clock" and things go into and out of existence by cause and effect according to set laws without any divine thought in the process. In such case, "Ross Hornsby" is just one of many arbitrary iterations of a species that happened to arise out of natural processes. But, the Christian conception of reality holds that God wills each thing into being (and especially a person) as a sort of direct intervention by Him in the destiny of the created universe. As Hopkins has it, each thing cries "what I do is me: for that I came." That is, there will never be another you or another me or another this thing, and we each exist that we might be who God wills us to be, and God wills us to be because He intends our existence to form the cosmic destiny.
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