Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/514

Rh hypothesis, and no longer with the original conjunction. It was a fact within the life of thought. The hypothesis ran thus: “The conjunction is to be explained as a relation, holding its own terms in unity.” Hereupon thought undertook so to think this hypothesis as to find its whole meaning. Thought hereupon reflectively observed, “But our relation, as soon as defined, becomes also a term of a new relation.” More in particular, the original question ran, "What is the unity of A and B?” The hypothesis said, “Their unity lies in their relation R; for the terms of a relationship are linked and unified by that relationship.” The reflective criticism runs, "But in creating R, as the ideal link between A and B, regarded now not as they were externally conjoined, but ideally as terms of a relationship, we have only recreated, in the supposed complex R A, or R B, or A R B, the type of situation originally presented. For A and B were to be objects of thought. They therefore needed a link. Therefore, as we said, they were to be viewed as terms linked by their relation. But the relation R, as soon as it is made an object of thought, becomes a term for the same reason which made us regard A and B as terms. For our implied principle was that objects of thought, if various, and yet united, are to be viewed as terms of a relationship. Our thinking process must therefore proceed to note, that if A and B are terms to be linked, R also, by the same right, is a term to be linked to A or to B, or to both, and so on ad infinitum.”

But the gist of this reflection may be better generalized thus: A thinking process of the type here in question recreates, although in a new instance, the very kind of ideal object that, by means of its process, it proposed to alter into some more acceptable form. The change of situation which it intended, leads, and must lead, to a reinstatement of essentially the same sort of situation as that which was to be changed. Or, again, The proposed solution reiterates the problem in a new shape. Therefore, the operation of thought here in question is what one may call, in the most general terms, an iterative, or, again, a recurrent, operation, — an operation whose result