Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/101

76 order-systems. Not Quantity, but Order, is the fundamental category of exact thought about facts.

Now what is the logical derivation of the category of serial Order? The answer to this question requires us to return to the study of what is logically implied in coming to discriminate between any two objects. To such a study I must devote a little space, despite the painfully abstract nature of the topic.

In certain cases, as we have seen, to compare attentively two objects, as to their differences and likenesses, is to observe a situation which implies that something is between the two, and that the two themselves are again between another pair of objects. The process of discrimination and of synthesis thus initiated proves, at least in some such cases, recurrent, or self-repeating, and leads us to form postulates about the objective structure of the system of facts to which the things in question belong. In order to estimate more carefully the meaning and the uni-