Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/527

508 any internal meaning such that, if you try to express it by means of a succession of acts, the ideal data which begin to express it demand, as a part of their own meaning, new data which, again, are new expressions of the same meaning, equally demanding further like expression. Then, if you endeavor to express this meaning in a series of successive acts, you get a series of results, M, M’, M’’, etc., which can never be finished unless the further expression of the purpose is somewhere abandoned. But such a successive series of attempts quickly gets associated in our minds with a sense of disappointment and fruitlessness, and perhaps this sense more or less blinds us to the true significance of the recurrent thinking processes. Let us try to avoid this mere feeling by dwelling upon the definition of the whole system of facts which, if present at once, would constitute the complete expression and embodiment of this one meaning. The general nature of the system in question is capable of a positive definition. Instead of saying, “The system, if gradually constructed by successive stages, has no last member,” we can say, in terms now wholly positive, (1) The system is such that to every ideal element in it, M, M’, or, in general, M(r), there corresponds one and only one other element of the system,