Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/109

of difference as something that is indeed an expression of my attentive purpose, but that is still more an instance of the limitations of my insight. I look for light, and so far I find a problem. The object ɑ differs from b. How? I cannot so far tell; for I do not yet see the structure of the difference as the expression of any one plan. But when I conceive, and then am able to find in experience, some third object c, which behaves like the m of my former definition, then, while my insight is still infinitely limited, I see the differences of ɑ, b, and c, or, (as we may now say, in case c is the intermediate object of the triad), I see the differences of ɑ, b, and m, as such that the recognition of the difference of b from ɑ follows for me inevitably upon the recognition of the difference, either of ɑ and m, or of b and m, or of both. I make this fact clear to myself by trying the ideal experiment of annulling or disregarding the difference of ɑ and m, and of b and m. I can try this experiment with exactness, because, in making it, I am observing my own voluntary acts. I observe hereupon that the difference between ɑ and b vanishes. In convincing myself of this fact, in seeing how the distinction of b from ɑ follows from first distinguishing one of them from m, I gradually begin to find that the nature expressed in ɑ is such that I am led over from ɑ to b by a single definable process of drawing distinctions. Or again, I thus conceive the nature of ɑ not as static and as merely given to me, but as a stage in a process that now has an actively appreciated and logically significant direction, — a direction determined by my own purposes, and also by the facts. Hereupon I can proceed in the direction of b by passing, in the course of