Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/517

498 process is due to the recurrent character of the operation of thought here in question. This relational way of thinking so operates as to reinstate, in a new case, the very type of situation that the explanation desired — the goal of the operation — was, in the former case, to reduce to some simple unity. The first complexity consequently survives the operation, unreduced to unity; while a new complexity, logically (not psychologically) due to the operation itself, appears as something necessarily implied. The reapplication of the same operation, if supposed accomplished, can but reinstate afresh the former type of situation. Hence the endless process. Now this process I consider not in so far as it is a mere temporal series of events, but in so far as it is the development, in a given case, of what a certain thought means. I do not assert the obvious existence of an Activity, but the logical necessity of a certain series of implications. The true meaning of the purpose C, expressed in the content M, logically gives rise to M’, which demands equally to be considered in the light of 'C, and thereupon implies M’’, and so on. Thus our argument does not depend upon a theory about how thought, as an “activity,” is a possible part of the world at all. I do not profess now to explain, say from a psychological point of view, the inmost nature of the operation in question, nor yet to find self-evident, in this place, the metaphysics of the time process. Mysteries still surround us; but we see what we see. And my point is that while we do not see all of what thought is, nor yet how it is able to weave its material into harmony with its purposes, nor yet what Time is, we do see that we think, and that this thought has, as it proceeds, its internal meaning, and that this meaning has, as its necessary and self-evident result, the reinstatement, in a new case, of the type of situation which the operation of the thought was intended to explain, or in some other wise to transform. When M is so altered by the operation C as to imply M’, M’’, and so on, as the endless series of results of the iterative operation of thought, we see not only that this is so, but why this is so. And unless we see this, we see nothing whatever, whether in