Nouns then express things whose being is completed, not whose being is in process, or whose being depends upon some other being. And that no doubt accounts for the feeling that when one is using nouns, one is manipulating the symbols of a self-subsistent reality.[124] There seems little doubt that an ancient metaphysical system, grown to be an _habitus_ of the mind through long acceptance, gives the substantive word a prime status, and this fact has importance when we come to compare the noun with the adjective in power to convince by making real. Suffice it to say here that the noun, whether it be a pointer to things that one can touch and see, as _apple_, _bird_, _sky_, or to the more or less hypothetical substances such as _fairness_, _spook_, _nothingness_, by rule stands at the head of things and is ministered to by the other parts of speech and by combinations. _The Adjective_ The adjective is, by the principle of determination just reviewed, a word of secondary status and force. Its burden is an attribute, or something added. In the order of being to which reference has been made, the noun can exist without the adjective, but not the adjective without the noun. Thus we can have “men” without having “excellent men”; but we cannot have “excellent” without having something (if only something understood) to receive the attribution. There are very practical rhetorical lessons to be drawn from this truth. Since adjectives express attributes which are conceptually dispensable to the substances wherein they are present, the adjective tends to be a supernumerary. Long before we are aware of this fact through analysis, we sense it through our resentment of any attempt to gain maximum effect through the adjective. Our intuition of speech seems to tell us that the adjective is question-begging; that is to say, if the thing to be expressed is real, it will be expressed through a substantive; if it is expressed mainly through adjectives, there is something defective in its reality, since it has gone for secondary support.[125] If someone should say to us, “Have some white milk,” we must suppose either that the situation is curious, other kinds of milk being available, or that the speaker is trying to impose upon us by a piece of persiflage. Again, a mountain is a mountain without being called “huge”; if we have to call it huge, there is some defect in the original image which is being made up. Of course there are speech situations in which such modifiers do make a useful contribution, but as a general rule, to be applied with discretion, a style is stronger when it depends mainly upon substantives sharp enough to convey their own attributes.