If the mind be not thus exhibited in its process, in the sum and context of its relations, we may mean what we like with each mental object that comes under our observation: but with as much right another observer may mean something else. We may, of course, define as we please: we may build up successive definitions into a consistent total: but such a successful arrangement is not a real science. Unless we show how this special form of mind is constituted, we are dealing with abstractions, with names which we may analyse, but which remain as they were when _our_ analysis is over, and which seem like unsubstantial ghosts defying our coarse engines of dissection. They are not destroyed: like immaterial and aery beings they elude the sword which smites them, and part but to re-unite. The name, and the conception bodied forth in it, is indeed stagnant, and will to all appearance become the ready prey of analysis: but there is something behind this materialised and solidified conception, this worn-out counter or sign, which mere analysis cannot even reach. And that underlying nature is a process or movement, a meeting of elements, which it is the business of philosophy to unfold. The analyst in this case has dealt with ideas as if they were a finer sort of material product, a fixed and assailable point: and this is perhaps the character of the generalised images, which take the place of thoughts in our customary habits of mind. But ideas, when they have real force and life, are not hard and solid, but, as it were, fluid and transparent, and can easily escape the divisions and lines which the analytical intellect would impose. Perhaps some may think that it is unwise to fight with ghosts like these, and that the best plan would be to disregard this war of words altogether. But, on the other hand, it may be urged that such unsubstantial forms have a decided reality in life: that men will talk of them and conjure by their means, with or without intelligence; and that the best course is to understand them. It will then be seen that it is our proper work as philosophers to watch the process, by which the spiritual unity divides and yet retains its divided members in unity. Even in the first steps we take to get a real hold of an object we see this. To understand it, we must deprive it of its seeming independence. Every individual object is declared by the logician to be the meeting of two currents, the coincidence of two movements. It concentrates into an undecompounded unit,--at least such it appears to representative or material thought,--two elements, each of which it is in turn identifiable with. The one of these elements has been called the self-same (or identity), the universal, the genus, the whole: while the second is called the difference, the particular, the part. And by these two points of reference it is fixed,--by two points which are for the moment accepted as stationary. What has thus been stated in