It is no reply to this position to say that the "elements" or simples were there prior to inquiry and to analysis and abstraction. Of course their subject-matter was in some sense "there"; and, being there, was found, discovered, or detected--hit upon. I am not questioning this statement; rather, I have been asserting it. But I am asking for patience and industry to consider the matter somewhat further. I would ask the man who takes the terms of logical analysis (physical resolution for the sake of getting assured evidential indications of objects as yet unknown) to be things which coexist with the things of a non-inferential situation, to inquire _in what way_ his independent given ultimates were there prior to analysis. I would point out that in any case they did _not_ pre-exist _as_ signs. (_a_) Consequently, whatever traits or properties they possess as signs must at least be referred exclusively to the reflective situation. And they must possess some distinguishing traits _as_ signs; otherwise they would be indistinguishable from anything else which happens to be thought of, and could not be employed as evidence: could not be, in short, what they are. If the reader will seriously ask just what traits data do possess as signs, or evidence, I shall be quite content to leave the issue to the results of his own inquiries. (_b_) Any inquiry as to _how_ the data antecedently exist will, I am confident, show that they do not exist in the same purity, the same external exclusiveness and internal homogeneity, which they present within the situation of inference, any more than the iron which pre-existed in the rocks in the mountains was just the same as the fluxed and extracted ore. Hence they did not exist in the same isolated simplicity. I have not the slightest interest in exaggerating the scope of this difference. The important matter is not its extent or range, but what such a change--however small--indicates: namely, that the material is entering into a new environment, and has been subjected to the changes which will make it useful and effective in that environment. It is trivial to suppose that the sole or even the primary difficulty which an analytic realism has to face is the occurrence of error and illusions, of "secondary" qualities, etc. The difficulty resides in the contrast of the world of a naïve, say Aristotelian, realism with that of a highly intellectualized and analytic disintegration of the everyday world of things. If realism is generous enough to have a place _within_ its world (as a _res_ having social and temporal qualities as well as spatial ones) for data in process of construction of _new_ objects, the outlook is radically different from the case where, in the interests of a theory, a realism insists that analytic determinations are the sole real things.[5]