113. We have now pursued the antithesis between reality and the work of the mind along all the lines which Locke indicates, and find that it everywhere eludes us. The distinction, which only appeared incidentally in the doctrine of substance, between ‘the being and the idea thereof--between substance as ‘found’ and substance as that which ‘we accustom ourselves to suppose’--becomes definite and explicit as that between real and nominal essence, but it does so only that the essence, which is merely real, may disappear. Whether we suppose it the quality of a mere sensation, as such, or of mere body, as such, we find that we are unawares defining it by relations which are themselves the work of the mind, and that after abstraction of these nothing remains to give the antithesis to the work of the mind any meaning. Meanwhile the attitude of thought, when it has cleared the antithesis of disguise, but has not yet found that each of the opposites derives itself from thought as much as the other, is so awkward and painful that an instinctive reluctance to make the clearance is not to be wondered at. Over against the world of knowledge, which is the work of the mind, stands a real world of which we can say nothing but that it is there, that it makes us aware of its presence in every sensation, while our interpretation of what it is, the system of relations which we read into it, is our own invention. The interpretation is not even to be called a shadow, for a shadow, however dim, still reflects the reality; it is an arbitrary fiction, and a fiction of which the possibility is as unaccountable as the inducement to make it. It is commonly presented as consisting in abstraction from the concrete. But the concrete, just so far as concrete, _i.e._, a complex world of relations, cannot be the real if the separation of the real from the work of the mind is to be maintained. It must itself be the work of the compounding mind, which must be supposed again in ‘abstraction’ to decompose what it has previously compounded. Now, it is of the essence of the doctrine in question that it denies all power of origination to the mind except in the way of compounding and abstracting given impressions. Its supposition is, that whatever precedes the work of composition and abstraction must be real [1] because the mind passively receives it: a supposition which, if the mind could originate, would not hold. How, then, does it come to pass that a ‘nominal essence,’ consisting of definite qualities, is constructed by a mind, which originates nothing, out of a ‘real’ matter, which, apart from such construction, has no qualities at all? And why, granted the construction, should the mind in ‘abstraction’ go through the Penelopean exercise of perpetually unweaving the web which it has just woven? [1] ‘Simple ideas, since the mind can by no means make them to itself, must necessarily be the product of things operating on the mind.’ (Book IV. chap. v. sec. 4.)