Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/129

104 expression, reveals its true essence better than the mere description of the serially arranged data reveals the final truth of things. Whoever observes merely the series of linked and discriminated facts, has therefore but to reflect in order further to observe that one’s discrimination and linking of facts is itself also a fact, yet not a fact in the series discriminated, — but rather one stage in a life of self-expression. Thinking, also, is living. Science is justified as a type of action. And this is why we never can be content with discovering that the world is describable, but must note that all description is valuable as a process occurring in a life. That is why, moreover, we must always hold that the very facts themselves which we can at present interpret only in terms of Description, are the incidents of an orderly life of divine Self-Expression.

All then that we said at the outset about the presence of the world in the background, as the acknowledged reality in which we are to discover all the facts that ever we are to come to acknowledge in the concrete, was, as far as it went, valid. And the conclusion that we drew as to the way in which we, from our point of view, must undertake to solve the problem of the One and the Many by the serial discrimination and linkage of facts, expresses a significant, although partial, aspect of our search for truth. But the other aspect of the truth returns of itself whenever we reflect. The world is indeed there in the background. But it is there as