examined this species more accurately could, I believe, enumerate ten times as many properties in gold, all of them as inseparable from its internal constitution, as its colour or weight; and it is probable if any one knew all the properties that are by divers men known of this metal, there would an hundred times as many ideas go to the complex idea of gold, as any one man has yet in his; and yet perhaps that would not be the thousandth part of what is to be discovered in it.’ These two million properties, and upwards, which await abstraction in gold, are all, it must be noted, according to Locke’s statement elsewhere (Book II. chap xxiii. sec. 37), ‘nothing but so many relations to other substances.’ It is just on account of these multitudinous relations of the real thing that the understanding is inadequate to its comprehension. Yet according to Locke’s doctrine of relation these must all be themselves ‘superinductions of the mind,’ and the greater the fulness which they constitute, the further is the distance from the _mere_ individuality which elsewhere, in contrast with the fictitiousness of ‘generals,’ appears as the equivalent of real existence. Yet, according to the doctrine of relation, a creation of thought. 49. The real thing and the creation of the understanding thus change places. That which is given to the understanding as the real, which it finds and does not make, is not now the bare atom upon which relations have to be artificially superinduced. Nor is it the mere present feeling, which has ‘by the mind of man’ to be made ‘significant,’ or representative of past experience. It is itself an inexhaustible complex of relations, whether they are considered as subsisting between it and other things, or between the sensations which it is ‘fitted to produce in us.’ These are the real, which is thus a system, a community; and if the ‘general,’ as Locke says, is that which ‘has the capacity of representing many particulars,’ the real thing itself is general, for it represents--nay, is constituted by--the manifold particular feelings which, mediately or immediately, it excites in us. On the other hand, the invention of the understanding, instead of giving ‘significance’ or content to the mere individuality of the real, as it does according to Locke’s theory of ‘generals,’ now appears as detaching fragments from the fulness of the real to recombine them in an ‘abstract essence’ of its own. Instead of adding complexity to the simple, it subtracts from the complex. Summary of the above contradictions.