cut adrift, each is simple, unrelated: Right, Duty, God. Conception in these circumstances either rests satisfied with declaring that Right is Right, God is God: or in a higher grade of culture, it proceeds to enunciate the attributes; as, for instance, God is the Creator of the world, omniscient, almighty, &c. In this way several isolated, simple predicates are strung together: but in spite of the link supplied by their subject, the predicates never get beyond mere contiguity. In this point Conception coincides with Understanding: the only distinction being that the latter introduces relations of universal and particular, of cause and effect, &c., and in this way supplies a necessary connexion to the isolated ideas of conception; which last has left them side by side in its vague mental spaces, connected only by a bare 'and.' The difference between conception and thought is of special importance: because philosophy may be said to do nothing but transform conceptions into thoughts,--though it works the further transformation of a mere thought into a notion. Sensible existence has been characterised by the attributes of individuality and mutual exclusion of the members. It is well to remember that these very attributes of sense are thoughts and general terms. It will be shown in the Logic that thought (and the universal) is not a mere opposite of sense: it lets nothing escape it, but, outflanking its other, is at once that other and itself. Now language is the work of thought: and hence all that is expressed in language must be universal. What I only mean or suppose is mine: it belongs to me,--this particular individual. But language expresses nothing but universality; and so I cannot say what I merely _mean._ And the unutterable,--feeling or sensation,--far from being the highest truth, is the most unimportant and untrue. If I say 'The individual,' 'This individual,' 'here,' 'now,' all these are universal terms. Everything and anything is an individual, a 'this,' and if it be sensible, is here and now. Similarly when I say, 'I,' I _mean_ my single self to the exclusion of all others: but what I _say,_ viz. 'I,' is just every 'I,' which in like manner excludes all others from itself. In an awkward expression which Kant used, he said that I _accompany_ all my conceptions,--sensations, too, desires, actions, &c. 'I' is in essence and act the universal: and such partnership is a form, though an external form, of universality. All other men have it in common with me to be 'I': just as it is common to all my sensations and conceptions to be mine. But 'I,' in the abstract, as such, is the mere act of self-concentration or self-relation, in which we make abstraction from all conception and feeling, from every state of mind and every peculiarity of nature, talent, and experience. To this extent, 'I' is the existence of a wholly _abstract_ universality, a principle of abstract freedom. Hence thought, viewed as a subject, is