Speaking of thought he says: “The relational form is a compromise on which thought stands and which it develops.” And all the particular antinomies which he discusses are interpreted as having their basis in the category of relation (_ibid._, p. 180). In his section on Appearance he goes through various aspects and distinctions of the world, such as primary and secondary qualities, substance and its properties, relation and qualitative elements, space and time, motion and change, causation, etc., pointing out irreconcilable discrepancies in them. He does not, in a _generalized_ way, expressly refer them to any common source or root. But it seems a fair inference that the relational character of thought is at the bottom of the whole trouble: so that we have in the cases mentioned precisely the same situation _in concreto_ which is set forth _in abstracto_ in the discussion of thought. The contradictions brought up are in every case resolved into the fundamental discrepancy supposed to exist between relations and elements related. In each case there is the ideal of a final unity in which relations and elements as such disappear, while in every case the nature of relation is such as to prevent the desired consummation. In at least one place, it is expressly declared that it is the knowledge function which is responsible for the degradation of reality to appearance. “We do not suggest that the thing always itself is an appearance. We mean its character is such _that it becomes one as soon as we judge it_. And this character we have seen throughout our work, is ideality. Appearance consists in the looseness of content from existence.... And we have found that everywhere throughout the world such ideality prevails” (_ibid._, p. 486, italics not in the original). It is not then strictly true that the divorce of meaning and existence instigates thought; rather thought is the unruly member that creates the divorce and then engages in the task (in which it is self-condemned to failure) of trying to establish the unity which it has gratuitously destroyed. Thinking, self-consciousness, is disease of the naïve unity of thoughtless experience.