The compensating dialectic whereby reason, under the guise of imagination, overthrows the narrowness of popular estimates, makes itself observed even in the popular use of the terms abstract and concrete. Terms like state, mind, wealth, may from one point of view be called abstract, from another concrete. At a certain pitch these abstractions cease to be abstract, and become even to popular sense very concrete realities. In the tendency to personification in language we see the same change from abstract to concrete: as when Virtue is called a goddess, or Fashion surnamed the despot of womankind. In such instances, imagination, more or less in the service of art and religion, upsets the narrow vulgar estimates of reality. But it upsets them, so to speak, by giving to the abstraction (through its creative power) that sensuous concreteness which the mere abstract lacks and which the ordinary mind alone recognises as real. It 'stoops to conquer.' Such a representation is, as Hegel says[1], 'the synthetic combination of the Universal and Individual': 'synthetic,' because not their free, spontaneous, and essential unity, but the supreme product of the artistic will and hand, which, rather than let the universal perish by neglect, build for it, the eternal and omnipresent, 'a temple made with hands.' In mythology we can see the same process: by which, as it is phrased, an abstract term becomes concrete: by which, as we may more correctly say, a thought is transformed into, or rather stops short at, a representative picture. The many gods of polytheism are the fixed and solidified shapes in which the several degrees of religious growth have taken 'a local habitation and a name': or they bear witness to the failure of the greater part of the world to grasp the idea of Deity in its unity and totality apart from certain local and temporary conditions. So, too, terms like force, law, matter,--the abstractions of the mere popular mind--are by certain periods reduced to the level of sensuous things, and spoken of as real entities, somewhere and somehow existent, apart from the thinking medium to which they belong. Such terms, again, as property, wealth, truth, are popularly identified with the objects in which they are for the time and place manifested or embodied.