Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/125

100 And this variety of possible points of view is not merely a chance accompaniment of description, but a necessary consequence of the way in which this series-forming-process of looking for what lies between any two objects proceeds. For from this point of view there is nothing about the objects, as thus discriminated, which makes it necessary to take them up in your investigation in one order rather than in another. Protective geometry deals with the facts of space in one way. Metrical geometry deals with them in another way. A higher development of mathematical thought shows how, by the addition of certain conceptions, one can pass from the series of conceived objects and relations of objects that projective geometry finds in space, to the series of the metrical geometer, and vice versa. And now there seem to be two equally justified ways of portraying the metrical properties of space. Or, in another field, in preparing the way for the description of the process of evolution, the historians and the geologists, the botanists, the zoölogists, the astronomers, — all contribute their various series of facts to be linked together in the larger generalization; and it is a mere historical accident in what order, or by what specialty, the particular series are brought to light. Hence, in general, since the discriminations upon which the formation of series depends might be made in any order, beginning with any ɑ and b, the World of Description is, even apart from our human social conceptions, a world where the same results are valid for various methods of approaching and so of expressing these results. It is a world, therefore, where truth is never discovered in its complete and final