Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/557

538 ents their place as first, next, and so on, and since only such self-representative systems result from the undisturbed expression of the intellect's internal meanings, therefore, an order that shall be transparent to the intellect, or that shall appear to it as its own deed, must be of the type exemplified in Dedekind’s analysis.

And so, as far as we have gone, the circle of our investigation is provisionally completed. The intellect has been studying itself, and, as the abstract and merely formal expression of the orderly aspect of its own ideally conceived complete Self, and of any ideal system that it is to view as its own deed, the intellect finds precisely the Number System, — not, indeed, primarily the cardinal numbers, but the ordinal numbers. Their formal order of first, second, and, in general, of next, is an image of the life of sustained, or, in the last analysis, of complete Reflection. Therefore, this order is the natural expression of any recurrent process of thinking, and, above all, is due to the essential nature of the Self when viewed as a totality. Here, then, although we are still merely in the world of forms, we know something about the One and the Many. 

We must now proceed to apply our previous considerations to the question of the constitution of any realm of Being, or of any universe.

Suppose, in the first place, for a moment, that one is to conceive the universe in realistic terms, as a realm whose existence is supposed to be independent of the mere accident that any one does or does not know or conceive it. Suppose such a world to be once for all there. Then it is possible to show that this supposed universe has the character of a self-representative system, and that, too, even if you try to define its ultimate constitution as unknowable.

For, in the first place, at the moment when you suppose that any fact exists, independently of whether you know it or not, it is obvious that you must in reality be making, or at