In these ways the abstract, in the ordinary meaning, becomes in the ordinary meaning concrete. The distinction between abstract and concrete is turned into a distinction between understanding and sense, instead of, as Hegel makes it, a distinction in the adequacy and completeness of thought itself. Thought (the Idea), as has been more than once pointed out, is the principle of unification or unification itself: it is organisation plus the consciousness of organisation: it is the unifier, the unity, and the unified,--subject as well as object, and eternal copula of both. An attempt is at first made in two degrees to represent the thought in terms of the senses as a sort of superior or higher-class sensible. When the impossibility of that attempt is seen, common sense ends by denying what it has learned to call the super-sensible altogether. These three plans may be called respectively the mythological, the metaphysical, and the positive or nominalist fallacies of thought. In the mythological, or strictly anthropomorphic fallacy, thought is conceived under the bodily shape and the physical qualities of humanity, as a separate unifying, controlling, synthetic agent, through whose interference the several things, otherwise dead and motionless, acquire a semblance of life and action, though in reality but puppets or marionettes: that is to say, it is identified with a subject of like passions with ourselves, a repetition of the particular human personality, with its narrowness and weakness. The action of the Idea is here replaced by the agency of supposed living beings, invested with superhuman powers. In the metaphysical or realist fallacy we have a feeble ghostly reproduction of the mythological. The living personal deity is replaced by a faint scare-crow of abstract deity. The cause of the changes that go on in nature is now attributed to indwelling sympathies and animosities, to the abhorrence of a vacuum, to selection, affinity, and the like: to essences and laws conceived of as somehow existent in a mystic space and time. In the positive or nominalist fallacy, the failure of these two theories begins to be felt: and the mind, which had only heard of unifying reason under these two phases and is meanwhile sure of its sense-perceptions, treats the objective synthesis as a dream and a delusion. Or, at best, it regards the synthesis as essentially subjective--as a complementary idealising activity of ours which ekes out the defects of reality, and brings continuity into the discontinuous. Our thought--(it is only _our_ thought)--is but an instrument, distinct from us and from the reality: yet acting as a bridge to connect these two opposing shores--a bridge however which does not really reach the other side, but only an artificial image, which simulates to us, and will for ever simulate, the inaccessible reality. This last view is the utterance of the popular matter-of-fact reason, when in weariness and tedium it turns from the attempt to grasp