And when _we_ step in to overcome the repugnance which the point of conception, or what is supposed the subject, shows against admitting a diversity of predicates,--when _we_ force it into union with these properties: or when we try to remove the separation which leaves the cause and effect as two independent things to fall apart; our action, by which we effect a unification of differences, may, from another and a universal point of view, be said to be the notion, or grasp of thought, coming to the consciousness of itself. Thought, as it were, recognises itself and its image in those objects of representative conception, which seem to be given and imposed upon the intellect. The two worlds, which the understanding accepts as each solid and independent,--the world of external objects or conceptions, and the world of self,--meet and coincide in the free agency of thought, developing itself under a double aspect. It is the 'original synthetical unity of apperception' (to quote Kant's words), from which the Ego or thinking subject, and the 'manifold' or body and world, are simultaneously differentiated. Thus, on the one hand, we ourselves no longer remain a rigid unity, existing in antithesis to the objects presupposed or referred to by representative thought: and on the other hand the so-called thing loses its hardness and fragmentary independence, as distinguished from our apprehension of it. _Our_ action, as we incline to call it, which mends the inadequacies of terms, is from a philosophic point of view, the notion itself coming to the front and claiming recognition. The process of thought is then seen to be a totality, of which our faculties, on the one hand, and the existing thing, on the other, are isolated abstractions, supposed habitually to exist on their own account. To view either of these systems, the mental, on the one hand, and the objective world, on the other, as self-subsistent, has been the error in much of our metaphysics, and in the popular conceptions of what constitutes reality. The idealism of metaphysicians has been often as narrow and insufficient as the realism of common sense. An adequate philosophy, on the contrary, recognises the presence of both elements, in a subordinate and formative position. Representations may be compared to the little pools left here and there by the sea amongst the rocks and sand: the notion, or grasp of thought, is the tidal wave, which left them there to stagnate, but comes back again to restore their continuity with the great sea. In our thinking we are only the ministers and interpreters of the Idea,--of the organic and self-developing system of thought.