Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/122

Rh defined in terms of a fundamental postulate that always has an alternative over against it, the alternative expressed by saying that were the world concretely viewed as a Self-Representative System, then, for one who grasped the facts in the order of that system, the recurrent process of the interpolation of intermediate terms in series already recognized would no longer express the final truth. And finally, this conception of the World of Description, although it is constantly suggested by certain aspects of experience, meets constantly its empirical limitations. We frequently make discriminations that we have to accept as final, without being able to comprehend them any further through discovering, in our experience, new intermediate terms. So it is when we find a limit to our power to observe finer distinctions of shades lying between two shades of gray. So it is, still more markedly, when we fail to find definite signs that between two individuals whom we believe to be real (as, for example, between two men), there are all the possible intermediate grades of individual men. Our empirical world appears to us often discrete. The problem of the “missing link” is not confined to the well-known instances that the theory of evolution brings to our notice. And it is, above all, individuality, wherever experience suggests it to us, that seems associated with a certain discreteness.

Now it is perfectly sure that, so long as we view the world merely as the field of possible discriminations, of consequent series, and of intended abstract descriptions, we deal with all these empirical failures by noting that to discriminate two objects and yet to be unable to find