Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/70



all our acknowledgment of facts is a conscious submission to an Ought, is a principle which still leaves numerous aspects of our world of human experience very ill-defined. We turn to a study of some of these aspects, and of their corresponding most fundamental Categories.

Let us give at once a list of the features of our experience which are here in question. First, then, the world of Facts is a world of Likenesses and Differences. These characters we find interwoven in our world with a most baffling complexity. We endeavor to deal with them, in an elementary way, by discriminating and classifying facts. But secondly, as we proceed to classify our world, we discover, for reasons which this lecture will have to study somewhat minutely, that the acknowledged facts appear as forming Ordered Series, and so as more or less obviously grouped into Systems, and subject to Laws. These laws, which have come to characterize all our modern views of Nature, appear to us to be universal in what I have called the World of Description. A decidedly new deduction of the most fundamental categories of this World of Description will be presented in this lecture. But thirdly, the very structure of this World of Description proves, upon closer analysis, that it cannot be the final expression of the inmost nature of things. We are