Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/131

106 principle of my life, as I come to myself, and, knowing what I want, proceed to do it, is a principle winning novelty through Recurrence. Again and again, I proceed, from one act to the next, and so always to new acts. But neither an interpolation of deeds between my own deeds, nor yet a consciousness of unbroken continuity in my own acts, would help me to understand myself. My order, then, so far as I grasp it at all, is, like the order of the number-series, discrete. That is shown in my very process of discriminating something between any two accepted facts, so far as it is my own process. For that process, as we saw, is a recurrent one. I find that ɑ is not next to b, but has m between. Then I conceive m1, inserted, then m2, and so on. But as I do this, my act of conceiving the new intermediaries comes next after a former act; and another act of conceiving intermediaries between ɑ and b comes, in my life, next after this one.

Now if, with this fact in mind, I look back on the world which I attempted thus to describe, I find that the limitation which experience often seems to set to my postulates about the discrimination of facts, may well be founded in the deepest nature of things. The true world, the World of Values or of Appreciation, as rightly viewed by an absolute insight, would be a world of Selves, forming in the unity of their systems One Self. This world would appear to such an insight as a Social Order. For the categories of the World of Appreciation, as we shall later more fully see, when we come to the study of our human Social consciousness, are the categories of the Self in Social form and expression. But as I discriminate the world, taking account now of ɑ and now of b, my discrimi-