Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/12

it, then, to interpret its world of facts as such that another Self could find these same facts, or some aspect of them, to be also its own facts? The power to make this abstraction, however much social intercourse is needed to give it definition, must have its logical roots in the consciousness of the Individual. Accordingly, in the second lecture, I have here presented a theory of how far the general contrast between the World of Description and the World of Appreciation can be logically (not psychologically) defined, apart from explicitly social experiences, on the basis of a certain contrast that arises between two aspects of the inner personal consciousness of any intelligent individual whose relations to the world are such as are our human relations. This logical deduction of the primal contrast between the “descriptive” and the “appreciative” points of view does not set aside my still emphasized doctrine that both the psychological development and the concrete logical application of the categories of the World of Description are possible only under essentially social conditions. For, as I point out on p. 96, sqq., of the text, the World of Description is essentially a world of abstractions, valid for the Self only in so far as it conceives itself as at present unable to find how the facts express its own conscious purpose, and, consequently, valid for the Self only in so far as the Self, in its submissiveness, conceives these facts as also valid for an indefinite number of other points of view, which it has not yet made its own. Thus, within the individual consciousness, I point out one of the roots from which the more abstract interpretation of the world that is “valid for all” the members of a society grows. My