We now reach the most obscure and difficult part of our subject. Among the nine hundred and odd replies collected, the one most frequently met with is “nothing.” There is no observation in which it does not occur at least once: in the majority of cases it is found one, two, three, four, or more times. If I take the word _cause_, the formula “I have no representation,” forms fifty-three per cent. of the total of answers collected; the rest saw the printed word or some concrete image; e. g., a stone falling, horses drawing, or other simulacra, of which several have already been enumerated. It is the same with all the other highly abstract terms (time, infinity, etc.). So that to return to the question which was to be the _exclusive_ object of our investigation,—“Is the general idea when thought, read, or heard, accompanied by anything in consciousness?”—we may reply, an image, a typographical vision, or nothing. We must now inquire, what this _nothing_ is, for it must be something. We are face to face with the problem which the pure Nominalists attacked, when they took this _nil_ in its proper sense. Were there indeed any who really pretended that we could have in mind words, and words only—nothing besides? This is a historical problem into which it is useless for us to enter. It is possible that some may have pushed their reaction against the extravagances of realism even to this point, but the thesis is totally insupportable; for at that rate there would be no difference between a general term, and a word of any unknown language: the latter is the pure _flatus vocis_, a sound that evokes nothing. If, on the other hand, by word we mean sign, everything changes, since the sign implies and envelops something. Such appears to me to be the true interpretation.[85] So that for the cases which alone concern us for the moment, i. e., those in which the reply was “Nothing,” there are two elements, the one existing in consciousness (word heard or auditory image), the other subconscious, but not therefore invalid and inaccurate. Hence we must penetrate into the obscure region of the unconscious, in order to apprehend the something which gives to the word its signification, its life, its power of substitution.