Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/66

Rh the “objective facts,” in Nature or in the life of Man, are not thus ever to be verified, at any one instant of our lives. They are real for us, but they are real as the acknowledged objects whose structure transcends what is now given to us. Our question in the present discussion being this, “What determines us to acknowledge as real one rather than another system of particular facts?” we have here pointed out that the first determining principle, namely, the Ought, requires us to acknowledge at each moment as real certain particular facts which, even while they are conceived as limiting, constraining, and so determining our acts, are also conceived as thereby enabling us even now to accomplish our will better than we could if we did not acknowledge these facts. The “constraint” to which we here refer is meanwhile not first known as due to a cause, but comes to us in the form of the fact that our will is not now wholly expressed.

The Category of the Ought may thus be defined as implying three subordinate Categories: first, that of the Objectivity of all particular facts; secondly, that of the Subjectivity of the grounds for our acknowledgment of every particular fact; thirdly, that of the universal Teleology which, from our point of view, constitutes the essence of all facts. Objective are the facts that our experience suggests to us, because they are always, in some respect, other than what we now consciously find presented to us, as the relative fulfilment of our purposes, within our momentary experience. In this aspect they appear foreign to our will, and they so appear in various degrees, so that many writers have maintained that our