The same Aristotle who considered the formal as that which makes real, denied the objective existence of relations. He said that such qualities as greater, or smaller, double or half, indeed all relations (the πρός τι of things) did not belong to the things, but were added to them by the thinking subject. Ergo relations are mere products of the mind, they have no objective value. This was in favor of the Nominalists. Now it is true that some relations are purely mental in so far as the comparison upon which they rest is purely imaginary. An answer to the question, Who was the greater, Alexander or Cæsar? depends upon the standard of measurement which we create for the special purpose. Some such relations have no objective value, they are not facts but a play of imagination dependent on the recognition of the standard of measurement. But how is it, if we express the relation between the gravity of a stone and the whole mass of the earth as it manifests itself in the stone’s fall? Is that also a mere product of the mind? Certainly Newton’s laws describing gravitation in exact and mathematical formulas are a product of the mind, but this product of the mind has an objective value, it has a meaning, it describes facts, and these facts are certain relations between certain things. * * * * * The fault of the modern misconception of relativity lies in the assumption that the two or more things are considered as things in themselves. We are apt to consider the gravity of two masses, of a stone and of the earth, as a relation between two independent things. Here is the stone and there is the earth and the relation is considered as some third item, being the connection in which the one stands to the other. In reality there are not two things and, in addition to them a betweenness of the two things. The world is not a sum of things, not even a system of things, but a whole indivisible entirety and what we call things are abstractions which serve special purposes in the household of cognition. All things consist as it were of innumerable relations to all other things. When we abstract one special process which takes place in the province of what we are wont to call _two_ things, we have to deal with a relation. There are no relations of themselves and there are no things of themselves. Relations describe certain features of reality obtaining between what we call two or more things, and in this description all other features of which the real things consist are purposely omitted. There is no quality of things but it is at the same time a quality of relation. Every quality of a thing characterises it under a certain condition; it appears as an effect upon something and thus it is actual as a relation. Cognition analyses things into bundles of relations and all these relations together make up the things.