Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/107

82 has so much to say, and which, for him, constitute the insoluble problem of our finitude.

Now the effort to answer the question thus raised is not merely an idle subtlety of the philosophers. As a fact, all the sciences are full of specific contributions towards the answers to just such questions. Yes, even unreflective common sense daily undertakes to do something towards answering problems of the sort. Common sense and science, however, go about the matter more concretely than the philosophers have usually done. In ordinary life we recognize the problem of the presence of One in a pair of discriminated objects only by proceeding at once to look for still another instance of the same kind of likeness and difference. Baffled by the so formal triad just named, viz. the triad of the One nature and the two expressions, we help ourselves by searching out a more concrete triad. We compare, if possible, both objects with a third object, as concrete as themselves, which serves us as a “common standard.” This third object is preferably an already known one, whose choice sums up the results of a long course of previous experience. To help us at all, however, it must obviously possess something of the “common nature” that interests us in b and c. It will, of course, differ from both of them. But most of all it helps us when it is so much like ɑ and b, and yet so definitely unlike them, that the triad, ɑ, b, c, leads us to definite observations of the sort characterized in the foregoing exact definition of the relationship between. If one of the triad is such that upon reflection we observe a particular order of dependence amongst the acts whereby we distinguish the three objects, i.e. if one