Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/91

66 final. For, that the world permits us, up to a certain point, to describe it, does help to throw light on the true nature of things. For the rest, I shall of course attempt here no account of the psychological genesis of our describing intelligence, or of its categories. I am concerned only with the logical genesis of these ideas, that is, with the way in which their simpler forms determine their more complex ones.

We return then to the view that the real world consists of facts which are, so to speak, waiting for us to attend to their presence. What constitution must such a world possess?

In reply to this question, I must next point out certain accompaniments of the process of discrimination which are of fundamental importance for our interpretation of the structure of any realm that we are to conceive as an object of possible attention. If I discriminate attentively between two facts in space, such as two marks on a blackboard, or two sides of the same coin or die, I observe, in general, that there is something between these two discriminated objects, and also that there are regions of space between which these two distinguished objects are to be found. So that, in such a case, one discrimination demands, as it were, another. One analysis of a whole into elements calls for further analysis. And every union of discriminated elements into a new whole (as, for instance, the two sides of the die form, when taken together with the material between them, a single whole), — every such union, I say, leads us to distinguish only so much the more clearly between this new whole and the “rest of the world,” which