That these methods, however indispensable and brilliantly successful in their own province, are unserviceable for philosophical cognition, is self-evident. They have pre-suppositions; and their style of cognition is that of understanding, proceeding under the canon of formal identity. In Spinoza, who was especially addicted to the use of the geometrical method, we are at once struck by its characteristic formalism. Yet his ideas were speculative in spirit; whereas the system of Wolf, who carried the method out to the height of pedantry, was even in subject-matter a metaphysic of the understanding. The abuses which these methods with their formalism once led to in philosophy and science have in modern times been followed by the abuses of what is called 'Construction.' Kant brought into vogue the phrase that mathematics 'construes' its notions. All that was meant by the phrase was that mathematics has not to do with notions, but with abstract qualities of sense-perceptions. The name 'Construction (_construing_) of notions' has since been given to a sketch or statement of sensible attributes which were picked up from perception, quite guiltless of any influence of the notion, and to the additional formalism of classifying scientific and philosophical objects in a tabular form on some pre-supposed rubric, but in other respects at the fancy and discretion of the observer. In the background of all this, certainly, there is a dim consciousness of the Idea, of the unity of the notion and objectivity,--a consciousness, too, that the idea is concrete. But that play of what is styled 'construing' is far from presenting this unity adequately--a unity which is none other than the notion properly so called: and the sensuous concreteness of perception is as little the concreteness of reason and the idea.