Page:Science and the Modern World.djvu/51

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itself in its own particular essence, including its immediate concrete values. This is a question of direct experience, dependent upon sensitive subtlety. There is then the abstraction of the particular entities involved, viewed in themselves, and as apart from that particular occasion of experience in which we are then apprehending them. Lastly there is the further apprehension of the absolutely general conditions satisfied by the particular relations of those entities as in that experience. These conditions gain their generality from the fact that they are expressible without reference to those particular relations or to those particular relata which occur in that particular occasion of experience. They are conditions which might hold for an indefinite variety of other occasions, involving other entities and other relations between them. Thus these conditions are perfectly general because they refer to no particular occasion, and to no particular entities (such as green, or blue, or trees) which enter into a variety of occasions, and to no particular relationships between such entities.

There is, however, a limitation to be made to the generality of mathematics; it is a qualification which applies equally to all general statements. No statement, except one, can be made respecting any remote occasion which enters into no relationship with the immediate occasion so as to form a constitutive element of the essence of that immediate occasion. By the 'immediate occasion' I mean that occasion which involves as an ingredient the individual act of judgment in question. The one excepted statement is, — If anything out of relationship, then complete ignorance as to it. Here by ‘ignorance,’ I mean ignorance;