Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/132

107 nation, determined as it is by the interest of ray individual development, does not seize upon the facts in the order in which they are actually determined by the Will whose expression is the world. As I take the facts, they come to me as incidents in my individual life. Since I fail to grasp the One in the Many in. these cases, I postulate the intermediaries, and have a right to do so in so far as that can further my own purpose of comprehension, which itself is a part of the world-purpose, and which is accordingly sure, within its limits, of representing one aspect of the truth. The true world, however, is not the world of description, but the world of socially interrelated Selves. And the world as we describe it, is the world viewed in the order of our own processes of description, which as incident in our human life, have their value, but are expressions of the true world order, only in so far as they reveal to us the life of things. Our conclusion is that the true series of facts in the world must be a Well-Ordered Series, in which every fact has its next-following fact. The series discoverable by us in the World of Description are characterized by the prevalence, for our view, of the relation Between. Hence they do not appear to us as Well-Ordered Series. But just in so far they are inadequate expressions of the truth.

We are now prepared to consider the more special form which these general categories will take when we come to study our human experience of Nature and of our fellows. But before we make that transition, there is still something to be said regarding one further fundamental conception, — that of Time.