The first part of Logic, the theory of Being[1], may be called the theory of unsupported and freely-floating Being. We do not mean something which _is,_ but the mere 'is,' the bare fact of Being, without any substratum. The degree of condensation or development, where substantive and attribute, or noun and verb, co-exist, has not yet come. The terms or forms of Being float as it were freely in the air, and we go from one to another, or--to put it more correctly--one passes into another. The terms in question are Is and Not: Become: There is: Some and Other: Each: One: Many: and so on through the terms of number to degree and numerical specificality. This Being is immediate: i.e. it contains no reference binding it with anything beyond itself, but stands forward baldly and nakedly, as if alone; and, if hard pressed, it turns over into something else. It includes the three stages of Quality, Quantity, and Measure. The ether of 'Is' presumes no substratum, or further connexion with anything: and we only meet a series of points as we travel along the surface of thought. To _name,_ to _number_, to _measure_, are the three grades of our ordinary and natural thought: so simple, that one is scarcely disposed to look upon them as grades of thought at all. And yet if thought is self-specification, what more obvious forms of specifying it are there than to name (so pointing it out, or qualifying it), to number (so quantifying it, or stating its dimensions), and to measure it? These are the three primary specificates by which we think,--the three primary dimensions of thought. Thought, in so determining, plays upon the surface, and has no sense of the interdependence of its terms. And if we could imagine a natural state of consciousness in which sensations had not yet hardened into permanent things, and into connexions between things, we should have something like the range of Immediate Being. Colours and sounds, a series of floating qualities, pass before the eye and the ear: these colours and sounds are in course of time counted: and then, by applying the numbers to these qualities, we get the proportions or limits ascertained. When this process in actual life,--the advance from the vague feelings which tell us of sweet, cold, &c., by means of a definite enumeration of their phenomena, to the rules guiding their operation,--is reduced to its most abstract terms, we have the process of Being. It would be the period when a distinction between things and their actions or properties has not arisen. The demonstrative pronouns and the numerals are among the linguistic expressions of Being in its several stages. Perhaps too we may illustrate it by the so-called 'impersonal' verb--which has hardly reached the stage of verb proper, having no subject: or by the name which still fluctuates between the stage of substantive or adjective.