Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/50

Rh or of this instant, fragments of a meaning which can only be conceived with consistency by regarding it as embodied in an experience of wider scope, of determinate constitution, and of united significance. That this is true, our general Theory of Being undertook to show. How in the concrete it takes place, in what special ways our consciousness is at once transcended, and included in a wider experience, it is the purpose of our whole present series of discussions to make clearer; and not until the end of the undertaking can one judge the degree of our success.

We proceed next to the characterization of certain more special principles that consciously determine us, at any moment, to acknowledge as real one rather than another fact or system of concrete facts, such as the existence of our fellows, or of Nature, or our own past lives. Herewith we enter upon the promised study of some of the fundamental Categories of human experience. We care not to write out or to defend any table of such Categories. We make no attempt to be exhaustive or systematic. But some specification of our general theory, in such wise as to show its application to our special type of human knowledge, is indeed a necessary preliminary to our study of Nature and of Man.

As in our general discussion of Being, so here, we must take our starting-point from the fact that our knowledge always involves deeds. In so far as I now consciously mean anything, I am acting. But, as I find, I am acting at present under a twofold limitation. I neither know the whole of what it is that I mean to