Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/113

88 thus defined is determined by the logical sequence, according to which one distinction is observed to follow from another. But because we are thus led better to comprehend what the objects discriminated are, we now make still a further and provisional postulate: Between any two objects of the world there is always another to be found. Our power to illustrate this postulate in our empirical investigations is very wide, but is also always limited. And the postulate itself would indeed fail wholly to receive application beyond a certain definite point, if we could only come to understand all the objects of our world as a single ordered series of the type of the whole number-series. For then any pair of directly successive objects would have no object between them. But, then, to be sure, the objects of the world, if so understood, would no longer need to be discriminated merely in pairs. They would be logically given, all at a stroke (like the whole numbers), as an expression of a single self-representative Purpose, and we should have to look no further than this purpose for the transparent definition of all our facts. But in discriminating pairs and then triads of facts, we come as yet upon no purpose, but our own descriptive purpose, of trying to find the One in the midst of this given Many. Our own process of discriminating proves indeed to be recurrent, but it looks always for yet another object between any two objects already distinguished. Hence, while the process of defining the intermediate terms is a Well-Ordered Process, that leads us from each stage to the next one, it tends to make us conceive a series of facts in which no term has any next neighbor,