Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/123

98 an intermediary, is, so far, to be baffled as to the relation of the One and the Many. Hence, so long as we are trying merely to describe what we find, and possess no other clew, we postulate, where we do not observe, the intermediaries. Our thinking, under the influence of such postulates, moves in the direction of conceiving every discrete series as a mere fragment of a continuum. And to “understand” the world, in terms of ideal continuity, is often our provisional goal. But the deepest principle of our procedure, even in this case, is the assurance that the One and the Many can be reconciled, and that the real world is the expression of our Purpose. In conceiving the World of Description, we view the facts, however, as if the only purpose that they could fulfil was the purpose of being discriminable. But perhaps even this purpose can be reached better in some other way. Perhaps the real world forms in its wholeness a Well-Ordered Series of a discrete type. For such, as we saw in the Supplementary Essay, is the characteristic form in which Selfhood is expressed.

Let us look, however, a little more closely at the sense in which this World of Description is also a world of abstraction. Here our attention is at once attracted by a consideration that I have so far kept in the background. Our principle has so far been this, “The real world is even now virtually present to my thought at every moment, as that whole which I acknowledge. My task in trying to come to clearer consciousness about the world is to discriminate what it is that I acknowledge.” It is indifferent, from this point of view, where I begin. Any ɑ and b will do to start my investigation.