82 SCEPTICISM. 



distilled from the infinite wealth of perception, and 

 rejects the greater part of the sensuous context as 

 irrelevant. It is tmiversal, i.e. common to indi- 

 viduals, and ■ hence incapable of representing their 

 uniqueness. It is discursive, i.e. it proceeds step by 

 step, from one definite conception to another, and 

 hence can only state a thing successively as a series, 

 and not simultaneously as a whole. So it is incap- 

 able of representing the continuous except by the 

 fiction of an infinity of discrete steps, and this 

 incapacity is the secret ground of the constant 

 attempts to regard Space and Time as composed of 

 discrete atoms and moments (§§ 6, 7), and to draw 

 hard and fast lines of demarcation, where reality 

 exhibits one thing passing into another by insensible 

 gradations in an uninterrupted flow. And, above 

 all, thought is adjectival. It cannot stand by itself, 

 but must always be attributed to some substantive 

 reality. In other words, thought must always be 

 somebody's thought, and any statement of our 

 thought must refer to something : the abstractions 

 of thought must be attached to some real subject 

 which they qualify. No statement we can possibly 

 make, can possibly be a fact, at the most it may be 

 trice of the fact, and to forget this is to commit the 

 most serious of philosophic crimes, viz., that of 

 hypostasizing abstractions. 



The objects of our thought, in short, are not real 

 existences interacting in the sensible world, but 

 ideal relations connected by the logical laws of an 

 ** eternal " validity. 



Hence the logical treatment, also, our thought 

 requires, differs : its highest category is not actual 

 existence, but logical necessity. And while in the 

 real world a fact cannot be more than a fact, and is 



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