Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/116

Rh the most widely sundered regions of our experience. If we disregard the empirical limitations that we constantly meet with in our attempts to find the desired intermediary terms, and if we consider only the foregoing postulates as defining for us how we are to conceive our world of acknowledged facts, we hereupon get a view of this world which may be summed up as follows: We may omit, for the time, from our notice, the before-mentioned possibility of a knowledge of the world that would reduce it to a single serial order of the general type of the Well-Ordered Series of whole numbers, where every term has one coming next after it. If we abstract from that possibility, we are left to the conception that Between any two facts there are to be found various series of intermediaries of the type now defined. The world thus regarded will consist for us of all these interwoven series, and will constitute a single System. The work of our knowledge, if we were to grow in knowledge indefinitely, on just these lines, would consist in the Description of this system. But this description would have the same general character that geometry illustrates in case of the space-world, which is only a particular example of such a linked system of interwoven series. Any such system would be capable of description in terms of Laws. The laws would express features common to various of the series present in this world. And the method of discovering laws would be, in its most general outlines, this: —

The whole system of the world may be viewed as made up of various different systems. For whole systems of facts can be discriminated from one another, and then linked by series of intermediate systems, precisely as ɑ and