Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/93

68 also becomes recurrent, and we are led to the other familiar postulate of the boundlessness of space.

What such an instance shows is: (1) that, in certain cases at least, our tendency to discriminate two objects leads us by itself to discriminate a third object, m, as between them, and to distinguish other objects, let us say f and l, between which both ɑ and b are; (2) that this observation may of itself lead to new discriminations, and so become, or tend to become, recurrent; and (3) that the result hereof may be to give us an idea of an infinitely complex objective structure which we are then disposed to ascribe to a system of facts (such as the points in space). So here the law of our discriminating process gives us a conception of a law of structure in the world of facts. This law may then be to any extent confirmed by further experience.

That not only space, but also time, suggests similar recurrent processes of discrimination, is familiar.

Now these well-known instances lead us to a more general question. Is this character of the process of discrimination something general in its nature, so that, wherever we discriminate, the conditions of such recurrent processes of finding new differences are present, or is the tendency to look for points between points, and so forth, a tendency determined by special conditions, such as those of our experience of space and time? And what follows with regard to the conception that we tend to form of the structure of the world of facts?

At first, the answer would seem to be that we may, upon occasion, come to perfectly clear limits in our discriminations. In the world of our pure conceptions, we