Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/111

86 of a single process of ideal construction, which I can conceive in volitional terms, as a process that expresses how one can pass from ɑ to b, or (to borrow a mathematical term, again) can transform ɑ into b. And the unity of this series, as the expression of a single volitional process, will be due to the fact that I can everywhere see, as I pass along the series, how one distinction, or act of holding apart two objects, depends for its very existence on another and previous distinction. For in this way my ideal process, going from distinction to distinction, establishes between every pair of distinct objects, an intermediary, which is viewed by me as making their distinction possible, or as holding them apart. Yet the intermediary terms, while they hold apart, also link.

This is, then, our general statement of how it is that every discrimination tends to lead us to the definition of series of objects, observed or conceived. At the same time we begin to see how and why every such series helps us to comprehend the structure of the world that we are to acknowledge as real. Now my main thesis here is that, in the World of Description, all understanding of facts in terms of general laws depends upon the conception and verification of such serial order in facts as I have been characterizing. The whole logic of our conception of general law in this World of Description turns, in my view, upon the single question, What for us is implied in discriminating ɑ from b? For the world acknowledged as beyond is presented to us at every