Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/87

62 contour of the rocky masses and become one with the whole. Thus simple, and in seeming no doubt paradoxical, is our formula for what is to be finite.

But the simplicity of the formula will prove endlessly fruitful. For this theory of our relations, as finite knowers, to the real world, predetermines what Form we ascribe to the system of facts whose reality we acknowledge.

We dealt at some length, in our study of the Third Concept of Being, with the definition of both physical and mathematical things as “objects of possible experience.” But from the point of view which we have reached at the present stage of the inquiry, the facts that we acknowledge as real are for us, at any one conscious instant, Objects of Possible Attention. That is indeed not their whole Being. But it is one valid aspect of their Being. In the undifferentiated background of our present consciousness of “the rest of the world,” all those real facts are even now present, but not as distinct objects. Any one of them could now be known, if only we were able to attend to its actual presence. Hence its real relationships are such as to permit, upon occasion, its discrimination from other facts in the way in which conscious attention discriminates.

Here, however, we meet, in its most elementary form, with that abstract way of viewing the world which expresses itself in the categories of the World of Description. The situation, at the moment, is this: A certain attitude of