Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/75

50 also true that the more closely I observe, and the more carefully I submit myself to the requirement “to see the facts as they are,” the more surely it is the case that the attitude of my attention in all this process of observation does, in its own degree, determine what differences amongst facts shall come to my observation. Careful measurement, for instance, that most characteristic of the processes upon which exact empirical science is based, involves a typically objective, “self-surrendering,” submissive attitude of attention. Yet, on the other hand, we must insist that just this attitude, observant as it is of certain small differences which our less exact activities ignore, finds what it seeks, and what otherwise gets forced by outer nature upon nobody’s observation, viz. precisely these small differences themselves, which meet our intent to be exact. What experience shows us as to the quantitative aspect of the world is, not that such differences exist wholly apart from our own or anybody’s attention, but that the attentive will to measure does find a successful expression of its purposes in experience, so that a consciousness of small differences in lengths, times, masses, etc., comes to be recognized, where untrained and careless attention had ignored every such difference. Here, too, then, the fact observed is the fulfilment of our intent to observe that kind of fact.

In general, we may say: Likenesses and differences are not recognized by us as aspects of the world existent wholly apart from any of our specific purposes, but as correlative to certain tendencies of our will, i.e. to certain interests, which are fulfilled in recognizing