Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/127

102 names. And in the life of the astronomer, considered as a man coöperating in a social task with other astronomers, the order in which the catalogue is made may be as sacred as any other moral task. Now the Reality is not the world apart from the activity of knowing beings, — it is the world of the fact and the knowledge in one organic whole. It follows that we simply do not tell the whole story of our live relations to the world when we report the results of our formation, through successive discriminations, of series of facts. The world is unquestionably there to be known. Its facts are objects of possible attention. They can be discriminated. They do form series. But that is not the whole truth about them. The world is also there to express a perfectly determinate and absolute purpose. Its facts are incidents in a life. — yes, in a life of many lives, — a rationally connected social system of beings that embody purposes in deeds. The facts can therefore not only be discriminated, but, in so far as we ever come to be conscious of their true sense, they are linked in a teleological unity. And this unity determines not merely what is the same for many points of view, but what is uniquely present, once for all, from the divine point of view, as the one true Order of things. And the true Series is that of the Self, and of its expression in life. The true variety is that of various individual Selves, who together constitute, in their unity, the Individual of Individuals, the absolute. Beyond our own circle of concretely known facts, there are not merely series of data to be discriminated, but volitional processes to be estimated, appreciated, and conceived in their true serial order, as the stages of the world’s life.