Abstraction belongs to this last type, with intervention of the process described by Cournot. Attention brings a feature into relief; inattention, and voluntary inhibition, act as extinguishers to the other characteristics. Let us pass from theory to practice. This antagonism is of current observation, almost a banality, whenever men of imagination are confronted with abstract thinkers. We must of course exclude those who by a rare gift of nature (Goethe), or by the artifice of education, are capable of handling the image and concept alternately. Let us take the artists as type of the imaginative thinker: the novelist, poet, sculptor, painter, musician, etc. Each dreams of an organic, living work, a _complex_. Some with words, others with forms, others with sounds; realists with the aid of minute detail, classics by means of general sketches; all make for the same end. Music again, which from its nature seems a thing apart, is an architecture of sounds of amazing complexity, often exciting contradictory states of mind. Among abstract thinkers (theorists, scientists) the tendency is always towards unity, law, generalities—towards _simplification_: by what is fundamental and essential, if the man be genuine; by shifting and accidental features, if he is a charlatan. The mathematician and the pure metaphysician have usually a distaste for facts, for multiplicity of detail. A writer whose name has escaped me says: “Every scientist smells of the cadaver.” This is our thesis, under the form of an image. Abstract thought is a cadaver. It would be more just, though less picturesque, to say a skeleton; for scientific abstraction is the bony framework of phenomena. The antagonism between the image and the idea is thus fundamentally that of the whole and the part. It is impossible to be at the same time an abstract thinker and an imaginative thinker, because one cannot simultaneously think the whole and the part, the group and the fraction; and these two habits of mind while not absolutely exclusive are antagonistic. * * * * *