Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/100

Rh occurring in the very bodies that would appear, from one point of view, to be amongst the most disconnected and mutually sundered objects of the visible universe.

And now, as to the more universal meaning of this serial structure of our world of facts, we may note in passing still one further consideration. It is a commonplace that the exact sciences of Nature have owed their exactness, up to the present time, and in the main, to their quantitative treatment of facts. The logic of the Conception of Quantity has its own very complex problems; but thus much is clear: Any system of quantities, such as distances, times, masses, temperatures, pressures, is a serial order-system of facts, or is a complex of such serial order-systems. For the relationships, Equal, Greater, and Less, which mark systems of quantities, involve arrangements in serial order-systems. Therefore, one has much to say for the thesis that the whole logical value of the quantitative conceptions in science is due, not to any peculiar advantage of the concept of quantity, as such, but to the exactness of the forms of serial order which are discoverable in case of any quantitative realm of facts. From this point of view it is not, then, the quantitative character of exact science which is its most essential feature, but the precision and relative exhaustiveness of its reduction of its own ranges of fact to serial