We must not, therefore, treat our imagination with contempt as was formerly the fashion, but rather the reverse. The two great periods of English Philosophy, Vaihinger remarks, ended with Ockham and with Hume, who each took up, in effect, the fictional point of view, but both too much on the merely negative side, without realising the positive and constructive value of fictions. English law has above all realised it, even, he adds, to the point of absurdity. Nothing is so precious as fiction, provided only one chooses the right fiction. “Matter” is such a fiction. There are still people who speak with lofty contempt of “Materialism”; they mean well, but they are unhappy in their terms of abuse. When Berkeley demonstrated the impossibility of “matter,” he thought he could afford to throw away the conception as useless. He was quite wrong; it is logically contradictory ideas that are the most valuable. Matter is a fiction, just as the fundamental ideas with which the sciences generally operate are mostly fictions, and the scientific materialisation of the world has proved a necessary and useful fiction, only harmful when we regard it as hypothesis and therefore possibly true. The representative world is a system of fictions. It is a symbol by the help of which we orient ourselves. The business of science is to make the symbol ever more adequate, but it remains a symbol, a means of action, for action is the last end of thinking. The “atom,” to which matter is ultimately reduced, is regarded by Vaihinger as equally a fiction, though it was at first viewed as an hypothesis, and it may be added that since he wrote it seems to have returned to the stage of hypothesis.[41] But when with Boscovich the “atom” was regarded as simply the bearer of energy, it became “literally a hypostatised nothing.” We have to realise at the same time that every “thing” is a “summatory fiction,” for to say, as is often said, that a “thing” has properties and yet has a real existence apart from its properties is obviously only a convenient manner of speech, a “verbal fiction.” The “force of attraction,” as Newton himself pointed out, belongs to the same class of summatory fictions.