Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/128

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Now this conclusion is suggested, apart from our own special Theory of Being, by any fair reflection upon what happens when discriminations are made, when series of facts are found and described, when various observers, proceeding from different starting-points, reach, like the projective and the metrical geometer, or like two students of an experimental science, the same abstract results. For, as a fact, one has only to reflect in order to see, as we just saw in the case of counting the eggs, or of cataloguing the stars, that the process of discrimination, or of forming series, is itself an incident in a life whose Internal Meaning lies not merely in the acknowledgment of facts, but also in the creation of novelties. Our interest in discriminating is expressed in the joyous “I see” of the discoverer. But this is the joy of living, of creating, as well as finding, a world. For in merely acknowledging facts one may indeed be said to find (in the sense that I here have in mind) something that, as one conceives, another might have found as well. But one is conscious of creating, only in so far as one believes that the expression of one’s purpose is an unique and individual fact, that has nowhere else in the world of Being its likeness. In consequence, the whole truth is that one discriminates, indeed, at every step, and in doing so acknowledges what one does not regard as one's present creation. But this very act of discrimination is, in the life of one who sees, a present, an individual, and in so far a creative expression of purpose. And the world, in permitting this