95. We have already seen, [1] that if by a ‘particular being’ is meant the mere _individuum_, as it would be upon abstraction of all relations which according to Locke are fictitious, and constitute a community or generality, it certainly can have no essential qualities, since it has no qualities at all. It is a something which equals nothing. The notion of this bare _individuum_ being the real is the ‘protoplasm’ of Locke’s philosophy to which, though he never quite recognized it himself, after the removal of a certain number of accretions we may always penetrate. It is so because his unacknowledged method of finding the real consisted in abstracting from the formed content of consciousness till he came to that which could not be got rid of. This is the momentarily present relation of subject and object, which, considered on the side of the object, gives the mere atom, and on the side of the subject, the mere ‘it is felt.’ Even in this ultimate abstraction the ‘fiction of thought’ still survives, for the atom is determined to its mere individuality by relation to other individuals, and the feeling is determined to the present moment or ‘the now’ by relation to other ‘nows.’ [1] See above, paragraph 45. Body as qualified by circumstances of time and place. 96. To this ultimate abstraction, however, Locke, though constantly on the road to it, never quite penetrates. He is farthest from it--indeed, as far from it as possible--where he is most acceptable to common sense, as in his ordinary doctrine of abstraction, where the real, from which the process of abstraction is supposed to begin, is already the individual in the fullness of its qualities, James and John, this man or this gold. He is nearest to it when the only qualification of the ‘particular being,’ which has to be removed by thought in order to its losing its reality and becoming an abstract idea, is supposed to consist in ‘circumstances of time and place.’ Such body Locke held to be subject of ‘primary qualities’: but are these compatible with particularity in time?