Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/512

Rh sis may be) has developed, within itself, as thought has reflected upon it, a certain internal multiplicity of aspects. That the hypothesis developes these diversities, is a fact, — but a fact how discovered? The only answer is, by Reflection. Thought developes by its own processes the meaning, i.e. to use our own phraseology, the “internal meaning” of this hypothesis. The hypothesis perhaps leads to a self-contradiction concerning the nature of A and B. In that case, the hypothesis, taken apart from A and B themselves, as an object for reflection, is seen to imply that some account of A, or of B, or of A B, is both true and false. Now truth is diverse from falsity, and whoever observes that a given hypothesis implies, through the development of its “internal meaning,” the coëxistent truth and falsity of the same account of a supposed external fact, has observed a fact not now about A and B as such, but about this internal meaning of the hypothesis, taken by itself, — a fact lying within the circle of thought’s own movement. This fact is a diversity developed by thought’s proprius motus.

Or, again, the hypothesis leads to the “infinite process.” An “endless fission” is sometimes said to “break out” in the world of conceived relations and qualities. This “principle of endless fission” “conducts us to no end” (p. 31). “Within the relation” the plurality of the differences is said to “beget the infinite process” (p. 180). Now, when thought sees that all this must be, and is, the necessary outcome of “a relational way of thought” (p. 33), thought again sees a fact, but a fact now present in its own world of ideas, and as the “self-evident” outcome of its reflective effort to express its own purpose. But, as we insist, despite the diversity, thought’s purpose is, in each case of this type, consciously One. It is the purpose to find the ground for the conjunction of A and B. Reflection sees that this one purpose, left to its own development, becomes diverse, and expresses its own identity in a variety of aspects. When thought sees this result of its own efforts, and sees the result as necessary, as universal, as the consequence of a relational way of thinking, then I persist-