78. IMMEDIATE SUB-CLASSES OF QUALITY AS _Genus Supremum_.—On account of the enormous variety of qualities which characterize the data of our experience, the problem of classifying qualities is not a simple one. Its details belong to the special sciences and to the other departments of philosophy. Here we must confine ourselves to an attempt at indicating the immediate sub-classes of the _genus supremum_. And in this context it will not be out of place to call attention to a remarkable, and in our view quite erroneous, trend of modern thought. It accompanied the advent of what is known as _atomism_ or _the mechanical conception of the universe_, a conception much in vogue about half a century ago, but against which there are already abundant evidences of a strong reaction. We refer to the inclination of scientists and philosophers to eliminate Quality altogether as an ultimately distinct category of human experience, by reducing all qualities to _quantity_, _local relations_, and _mechanical_ or _spatial motions_ of matter (_cf._ 11). In this theory all the sensible qualities of the material universe would be really and objectively nothing more than locations and motions of the ultimate constituents of perceptible matter. All the chemical, physical and mechanical energies or forces of external nature would be purely quantitative dispositions or configurations of matter in motion: realities that could be _exhaustively_ known by mathematical analysis and measurement. And when it was found that _qualitative_ concepts stubbornly resisted all attempts at elimination, or reduction to _quantitative_ concepts, even in the investigation of the material universe or external nature, scientists and philosophers of external nature thought to get rid of them by locating them exclusively in the human mind, and thus pushing them over on psychologists and philosophers of the mind for further and final exorcism. For a time extreme materialists, less wise than daring, endeavoured to reduce even mind and all its conscious states and processes to a mere subjective aspect of what, looked at objectively, would be merely matter in motion.(326) It can be shown in Cosmology, Psychology, and Epistemology that all such attempts to analyse qualities into something other than qualities, are utterly unsatisfactory and unsuccessful. And we may see even from an enumeration of some of the main classes of qualities that such attempts were foredoomed to failure.