The most striking illustration of the presence of these distinguishable aspects in all psychical occurrences is, of course, afforded by the case of error or illusion, the essence of which is the false apprehension of the _what_. Thus, when an ignorant villager sees a ghost, or a hypochondriac is tormented by “imaginary” symptoms of disease, the ghost or the malady is not simply non-existent; something is actually seen or felt, but the error consists in a mistake as to the nature of what is seen or felt. Now, the peculiarity by which direct and immediate apprehension is distinguished, for the metaphysician, from subsequent reflection about the contents of apprehension, is that in immediate apprehension itself we are not conscious of the distinction between these two aspects of psychical fact. The immediately experienced is always a _this-what_ or process-content[20] in which the distinction of the _this_ from the _what_ does not enter into consciousness. In any act of reflection, on the other hand, the _what_ is explicitly distinguished from the _that_, and then ascribed to it as something which can be truly said about it. The judgment or proposition, which is the characteristic form in which the result of reflection finds its expression, consists, in its most rudimentary shape, of the embodiment of this distinction in the separation of predicate from subject, and the subsequent affirmation of the first about the second. The work of thought or knowledge in making our world more intelligible to us essentially consists in the progressive analysis of a content or _what_, considered in abstraction from the _this_ to which it belongs. The _this_ may, as in the singular judgment or the particular judgment of perception, actually appear in our propositions as the subject to which the _what_ is explicitly ascribed; or again, as in the true universals of science, both the predicate and the ostensible subject of the proposition may belong to the content analysed, and the _this_, or directly apprehended reality of which the content forms an attribute, may not appear in the proposition at all. This is why the true universal judgment has long been seen by logicians to be essentially hypothetical, and why, again, thought or knowledge always appears to the common-sense man to be dealing with realities which have previously been given independently of the “work of the mind.” He is only wrong in this view because he forgets that what is given in this way is merely the _that_ or existence of the world of real being, not its _what_ or content in its true character as ultimately ascertained by scientific thought.[21]