But it may be that this illustration is not well chosen for the purpose of demonstrating that slip of the tongue which is supposed to give us an exact appreciation of the positive outcome of philosophy. Let us find another and better illustration which will be a transition from the inadequate to the adequate and thus throw so much more light on the obscurities of language. Another and better example of the inadequacies of language is the distinction between fish and meat. In this case, we entirely lack a general term for meat, one kind of which is furnished by aquatic animals and the other by terrestrial animals. Now let the reader apply this shortcoming of language to the distinction between physics and metaphysics, or between thought and reality. We lack a term which will fully indicate the relation between these two. Thoughts are indeed real things. True, there is a difference whether I have one hundred dollars in imagination or in reality in my pocket. Still we must not exaggerate this difference into something transcendental. Painted money or imagined money are in a way also real, that is in imagination. In other words, language lacks a term which will clearly express the different realities within the compass of the unit. The understanding of these peculiarities of language is calculated to promote the insight and enlightenment in regard to that secret lamp which man is carrying in his brain and with which he lights up the things of this world. The cultivation of the theory of understanding, the critique of reason, has an elementary significance for the elucidation of all things. This is not saying that philosophy, that special science with which we are here dealing, is a universal science in the sense in which antiquity conceived of it. But it is universal nevertheless in the sense in which the alphabet and other primary topics are universal. Every one must use his brains and should therefore take pains to understand its processes. Though the knowledge of these does not make other efforts unnecessary, still it explains many ideas, it elucidates the nature of thinking which every one is doing and which is frequently used in a more ruthless manner than a dog would treat a rag. The inertia which has prevented the one-sided idealists on the one hand and the one-sided materialists on the other from coming to a peaceful understanding may be traced to one of those slips of the tongue. We lack the right terms for designating the relationship between spiritual phenomena, such as our ideas, conceptions, judgments and conclusions and many other things on one side and the tangible, ponderable, commensurable things on the other. True, the reason for this lack of terms is the absence of understanding, and for this reason the dispute is not one of mere words, although it can be allayed only by an improvement of our terminology.