Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/112

moment as a single whole, within which the facts are present. These facts are for us, in one aspect of their nature, objects of possible attention. Attention begins to succeed when we discriminate. And so we have for one postulate about the acknowledged facts this: They are such that any pair of them could be known together through a single possible act of discrimination and comparison. This is the primal notion of linkage. Any pair of real objects are thus linked. But this postulate leads to others. Whatever pair of objects there may be in that world, since both members of the pair could be the object of a single act of discriminating attention, those two objects are already like each other and different from each other. Hence the single discrimination of the two presents a new problem, that of the union of One and Many. What is the unity, what the variety of this pair? The only way that we have of proceeding towards a solution of this problem, so long as we are still ignorant in the concrete of what One Will is expressed in these objects, is by passing from the pair to the triad, and defining an object that lies between the members of the first pair, in the sense of Mr. Kempe’s generalized definition of this relation. We then seek for this fact in experience. If we find it we are helped towards an understanding of the One and the Many. For in so far as we define such a triad, we discover how we could conceive one member of our original pair as transformed into the other, by means of a process that involves first distinguishing the intermediary between the two from one of the extremes, and then the other member from the object thus distinguished. The direction of the process of transformation