LECTURE IV
PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY
We have now learned something concerning the general Forms in which we conceive the facts that we acknowledge as real. No psychological account of the genesis of these forms in the history of the individual mind has been attempted. We have considered only the logical significance of certain fundamental motives that guide us, from moment to moment, and from stage to stage of our intellectual development, in the interpretation of our world and of our relations to this world.
These motives are twofold: (1) The motives that lead us to the concepts of one type of Serial Order, of Law, and of the World of Description; (2) The motives that lead us to conceive Reality as a Well-Ordered Series, and as a realm of Appreciation, that is of values, of Selfhood, of life other than the life that is directly revealed to us, by our present conscious purposes, and so as a realm of various Selves. These twofold motives correspond to our own twofold limitations as finite beings. For we know, just now, neither the whole of what this will of ours, in its present dissatisfaction, really intends and means, nor do we know how this will is expressed in the facts of universal experience. The World of Description, as a conceived objective order, is the result of our attempting, through a process of serial discrimination,
