Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/552

Rh of representing any thought of mine, whether itself reflective or direct, by a reflective thought of the form, This is one of my thoughts, implies that about any primal thought of mine, say the thought, To-day is Tuesday, there ideally clusters an endless system, N, of thoughts whereof this thought, To-day is Tuesday, may be made the first member. These thoughts may follow one after another in time. But, logically, they are all determined at one stroke by the one purpose to reflect. The system N consists of the original thought, and then of the series of reflective thoughts of the form, This is one of my thoughts; — yes, and This last reflection is one of my thoughts; and This further reflection is one of my thoughts; and so on without end. Now the system N is known to be infinite, not by counting its members until you fail and give up the process in weariness, but by virtue of the universal plan that every one of its members shall have a corresponding reflective thought that shall itself belong to the system. Hereby already N is defined as infinite, before you have counted at all. But this very plan determines a fixed order of sequence, whether temporal or logical, amongst the constituent elements of N; because each new element, to be taken into account when you follow the order, is defined as that element whereby the last element is to be imaged, or reflectively represented. But this recurrent, or iterative, character of the operation of thought whereby you follow the series of elements, is really only the result of the single plan of self-representation whereby once for all the system N is ordered according to its defined first member. For the whole system N, once conceived as mapped, or represented by that portion of itself which does not include the element called One, is even thereby at one stroke defined as an ordered series of representations within representations, like our series of maps of England. This system of representations within representations of the whole of N, is given as a valid truth, totum simul, by the definition of the undertaking. The series of temporally successive reflective thoughts, however, is found to be ordered as a result of this constitution of the entire system; and therefore is its