Save this last, the hypotheses enumerated (and internal sensation might also have been invoked; e. g., a localised pain as compared with several scattered pains) give only percepts or images, i. e., the raw material of abstract unity. This is itself a subjective notion. We said above (Chapter II) that the question whether consciousness starts from the general or the particular is a misstatement, because it applies to the mind which is in process of formation, categories valid only for the adult intelligence. So here. At the outset there is no clear perception of primary unity and subsequent plurality, or _vice versa_: neither observation nor reasoning justifies an affirmation. There is a confused, indefinite state, whence issues the antithesis of continuous and discontinuous, the primitive equivalents of unity and plurality. It took centuries to arrive at the precise notion of abstract unity as it exists in the minds of the first mathematicians, and this notion is the result of a _decomposition_, not of any direct and immediate act of postulation. It was necessary to decompose an object or group into its constituent parts, which are or appear to be irreducible. Then a new synthesis of these parts was required to reconstitute the whole, in order that the notion of relation between unity and plurality should be perceived clearly. It cannot be doubted that for the lesser numbers two, three, four, the successive perception of each separate object, and then of the objects apprehended together at a single glance, has aided the work of the mind in the conception of this relation. We have seen that many human races never passed beyond this phase. The abstract notion of unity is that of the indivisible (provisory). It is this abstract quality of the indivisible, fixed by a word, that gives us the scientific idea of unity as opposed to the vulgar notion. Perceived unity is a concrete, conceived unity is a quality, an abstract; and in one sense it may be said that unity, and consequently all abstract number, is a creation of the mind. It results like all abstraction from analysis—dissociation. Like all abstraction, it has an ideal existence; yet this in no way prevents it from being an instrument of marvellous utility.