Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/95

70

It is then worth while to examine the matter a little more closely. For if we can find whether or no every discrimination logically leads to some such recurrent process as the empirical instance of our consciousness of space has just exemplified, we may come to a result of great importance for the formulation of the Categories in terms of which we conceive the structure of the world of facts, so far as we view them merely as objects of possible discrimination.

And may I venture already to anticipate something of what this result will prove to be? Matters of this kind are not to be studied, except by a consideration of very subtle and abstract logical relationships. The inquiry, even in the fragmentary form here adopted, can be tolerable, in this context, only by virtue of its bearings on more concrete issues. May I, therefore, say, at once, regarding the outcome, simply this? I hold that by studying more closely what the process of discrimination logically implies, we shall be led to see something regarding what enables us to view all acknowledged facts as linked in a single Ordered System, in which countless definable Series of real facts are interwoven; and hereby we shall be led to a more definite idea of what is meant by the acknowledgment of Law in the natural, in the social, and in the moral order of the world. Thus our notions of the Unity of the world will become, in one aspect at least, more concrete.

How come we to the recognition of Law as an aspect of the real world? By means of some primal “intuition,” which (despite its name) inflicts itself upon us as an opaque assurance? Our Idealism knows of no such primal assurances. Every assertion must bear criticism.