The most common attitude of contemporary thought (and the one that is therefore usually designated as common sense, and as such opposed to philosophy) is a naively naturalistic one. But it would be a mistake to regard it as a simple and spontaneous attitude, and to identify it, for instance, with the naïve intuition of the artist, with a first grade of knowledge as yet untroubled by logical problems. The artist's vision is more distant from naturalism than the philosopher's concept, since common sense, however unreflected and illogical, is in itself a philosophy, and, though it may sound paradoxical, a transcendental one. The artist constantly identifies himself with his object; in his consciousness, the distinction between subject and object has not yet arisen. But the naïve naturalism of which we are now speaking is posterior to the logical judgment, in which that distinction first appears; and is obtained by keeping separate the two terms of the judgment, each of which exists only in relation to the other, and by transforming that relation into a quality of the object. The unity thus disrupted is artificially reconstituted by abolishing the subject, that is, by treating the subject itself as merely an object among many objects, or as a mere abstract intersection of objects. It is with this form of naturalism that realism generally coincides, and its abstracting process is the one that has been recently systematized by the New Realists. The justification of the naturalistic conception of truth, as truth of description, and the motive of its present popularity, is that it rests on a method of knowledge which is indispensable to the natural and mathematical sciences, and that the sciences have come to usurp, in modern times, for reasons which are obvious to every one, the place of science. It is not the less true, however, that wherever that method is applied, it reduces the living reality of life and thought to a heap of dead, immovable abstractions. There is no real danger in this as long as the abstractions are taken for what they are, and used as instruments for the purposes of our doing and understanding; but when they are considered as a complete equivalent of the living reality, then we become their prisoners, and are shut out by them from all possibility of true understanding. It is especially from the misuses of this method in the historical and moral sciences, from the degenerations of sociology, psychology, and philology, that we must be constantly on guard; lest in the very sciences of the human spirit we should miss that which is their true object, the human activity which creates the world of history and the values of life.