Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/90

Rh from my library window at home, sometimes, a young cat, despairing for the time of succeeding in her cherished desire to catch the gray squirrels that play about from branch to branch in the trees, and that occasionally tempt her to vain crouching and springing when they descend to the ground in pursuit of nuts. She has long hoped to find the world the expression of her Internal Meaning by getting her claws upon them. But these swift phenomena still baffle her finitude. They escape her sly approaches with a maddening agility. They scold her from above, and throw down bits of bark to insult her. At length she abandons all apparent efforts at direct attack. It becomes her will to lie for hours nearly motionless, simply watching them. She chooses, as it were, to pursue science rather than any more drastic course of action. She will learn their ways, and discriminate one of their habits from another. In her dull patience, she seems to give herself over to the study of the World of Description. It is an enlightened patience of a sort somewhat similar to this that has created for us our sciences.

Now my purpose just here is not to define the methods and the tests that are used in any special science, but to point out the most fundamental conceptions to which this way of taking the world leads us, so long as we try to abstract it from any more deliberately creative fashion of viewing things. It is plain that in this way we can hope for no final view of the whole truth of things. We shall be dealing with a realm of abstractions, yet they will prove to be fruitful abstractions, everywhere founded upon final truth, although in themselves not