  Second is Nishida’s recourse to the explanatory schema of wholes that reflect themselves in their parts. Here Nishida adapts the idea of self-representative systems presented in Josiah Royce and in Richard Dedekind’s idea of an infinite system reflected in its parts. For Nishida, if there are no parts outside a whole, its evident differentiation must be explained.  After his first major book, An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida came to explain this differentiating development not in terms of a temporal process but as the self-reflective or self-mirroring structure of a whole. Knowledge, for example, is not a matter of two disparate realities, a knowing mind and a known object, conforming to one another, but a single concrete reality that “reflects itself in itself” on differing levels that give rise to the more abstract notions of knowing subject and known objects. And after Nishida described self-awareness (jikaku) as the activity of self reflecting itself within itself, he came to speak of other structural wholes, including place or topos and even the world itself, as “self-aware” (jikaku-teki) insofar as they reflected themselves within themselves.