truth--why dream of truth when you possess learning?--he was writing an apology for opinion. He enjoyed understanding and imagining things plausibly, and had a great intelligence to pour into his constructions; but this very heat of thought fused everything into the mould of his method, and he gave out that he had understood every system much better than those who believed in it, and had been carried by its inner contradictions (which its adepts never saw) to the next convenient position in the development of human fancy, and of his own lectures. Abstraction, such as withdrawal of the mind from worldly affairs, is condemned by this philosophy: you must glut the brain and heart with everything that exists. An even worse abstraction, for a philosopher, is to detach the object from the subject, and believe it to exist independently. But what is abstraction? Can attention ever render things more discrete than they are in their own nature? Suppose I abstract a coin from another man's pocket: it is easily proved by Hegel's logic that such an abstraction is a mere appearance. Coins cannot exist as coins except as pocketed and owned; at the same time they imply an essential tendency to pass into the pockets of other men: for a coin that could not issue from the pocket would be a coin in name only, and not in function. When it actually passes from one man's pocket into another's, this circumstance, far from justifying us in thinking the coin a separable thing, shows that all men's pockets (when not empty and therefore, in function, not pockets at all) are intrinsically related and, in a higher sense, one and the same purse. Therefore, we may conclude, it was not the sly transference of the coin from my neighbour's pocket into mine that was the wrongful abstraction, but only the false supposition that if the coin was his it was not, by right of eminent domain, mine also. A man, in so far as he is the possessor of coins, is simply a pocket, and all pockets, in so far as there is transferable coin, in them, are one pocket together. In this way we avoid false abstraction by proving that everything is abstract.