It is true that few persons are aware that language stands for a world of general ideas, and that reflection has to do with this world of universals. Hence it is, too, that so much of the so-called science of education is very crude and impractical. Much of it is materialistic, and does not recognize the self-activity of mind; but makes it out to be a correlation of physical energies——derived from the transmutation of food by the process of digestion, and then by the brain converted into thought. Let us consider now the psychology of thinking, or reflection, and at first in its most inadequate forms. As a human process, the knowing is always a knowing by universals——a re-cognition, and not simple apprehension, such as the animals, or such as beings have that do not use language. The process of development of stages of thought begins with sensuous ideas, which perceive mere individual, concrete, real objects, as it supposes. In conceiving these, it uses language and thinks general ideas, but it does not know it, nor is it conscious of the relations involved in such objects. This is the first stage of reflection. The world exists for it as an innumerable congeries of things, each one independent of the other, and possessing self-existence. It is the stand-point from which atomism would be adopted as the philosophic system. Ask it what the ultimate principle of existence is, and it would reply, "Atoms." But this view of the world is a very unstable one, and requires very little reflection to overturn it, and bring one to the next basis——that of _abstract ideas_. When the mind looks carefully at the world of things, it finds that there is dependence and interdependence. Each object is related to something else, and changes when that changes. Each object is a part of a process that is going on. The process produced it, and the process will destroy it——nay, it is destroying it now, while we look at it. We find, therefore, that things are not the true beings which we thought them to be, but processes _are_ the reality. Science takes this attitude, and studies out the history of each thing in its rise and its disappearance, and it calls this history the truth. This stage of thinking does not believe in _atoms_ or in _things_; it believes in _forces_ and _processes_——"abstract ideas"——because they are negative, and cannot be seen by the senses. This is the dynamic stand-point in philosophy. Reflection knows that these abstract ideas possess more truth, more reality, than the "things" of sense-perception; the force is more real than the thing, because it outlasts a thing,——it causes things to originate, and to change, and disappear.