The general action of understanding, and of practical thought, is of this kind. It accepts the representative images which have emerged from sensation, as they occur: and tries to appreciate them, to give them precision, to carry them into details, and to analyse them until their utmost limits of meaning are explored. Where they have come from, and where they lead to,--the process out of which they spring, and which fixes the extent of their validity,--are questions of no interest to the understanding[10]. It takes its objects, as given in popular conception, as fixed and ultimate entities to be expounded in detail. We have taken number as one example of the transference of a sensible or sense-immersed fact into a form of thought: but a form which is still placed in a superior or mental space. One advantage of taking number as illustration, is that numbered things are distinguished from numbers in an emphatic and recognised way. Nobody will dispute that the abstraction, as it is called, has an existence of its own, and can be made a legitimate object of independent investigation. But if the process be more obvious in the case of the numerals, there must have been a similar course of development leading to the pronouns, the prepositions, and the auxiliary verbs--to what has been called the 'formal' or 'pronominal' or 'demonstrative' element, the connective and constructive tissue of language. Whether these pronominal 'roots' form a special and originally-distinct class of their own, or are derived from a transmutation of more material or substantial elements, is a question on which linguistic research casts as yet no very certain light. It is true that on the one hand etymology is mainly silent on the origin of pronouns, numerals, and the more fundamental prepositions (i. e. cannot refer them to roots significant of qualitative being): and one need not lay much stress on remarks, like that of Gabelenz[11], that in the Indo-Chinese languages the words for _I, five, fish_ have a like sound, as do those for _thou, two, ear_, or that _I am,_ originally means _I breathe_. In all languages--though with immense diversities of degree, this formal element has attained a certain independence. And in many instances we can more or less trace the process by which there grew up in language an independent world of thought: we can see the natural existence passing out of the range of the senses into spiritual relations. Before our eyes a world of reason is slowly constituting itself in the history of culture: and we, who live now, enter upon the inheritance which past ages have laid up for us.