Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/549

530 conceived, has been most frequently regarded, in the later discussions, either as a datum of sensuous experience, or else as an inexplicable and fundamental character of our process of conception. In either case the problem of the One and the Many is left unaualyzed. For an ordered series is a collection taken not only as One, but as a very special sort of unity, namely, as just this Order. That many things can be taken by us as in an ordered series, — this is true, but is once more the “bare conjunction” of Mr. Bradley’s discussion. We want to find out what act first brings to our consciousness that Many elements constitute One Order. Nearest to the foundation of the matter Dedekind seems to me to have come, when, without previously defining any number-series at all, he sets out with that definition of an infinite system of ideal objects which we have already stated, and then proceeds, substantially as follows, to show how this system can come to be viewed Whole.

Let there be a system N of objects, — a system defined as capable of the type of self-representation heretofore illustrated. That such a system is a valid object (of the type definable through our own Third Conception of Being), we have already seen by the one example of meine Gedankenwelt. For the ideally universal law of meine Gedankenwelt is that to every thought of mine, s, I can make correspond the thought, s’, viz., the thought, “This, s, is one of my thoughts.” Because of this single ideal law of the equally ideal Self here in question, the Gedankenwelt is already given as a conceptual system of many elements, — a system capable of exact representation by one of its own con-