508 P8YVH0L0OT. 



But on the other hand the abstraction is, so to speak, never 

 complete, the analysis of a compound never perfect, be- 

 cause no element is ever given to us absolutely alone, and 

 we can never therefore approach a compound with the 

 image in our mind of any one of its components in a perfectly 

 pure form. Colors, sounds, smells, are just as much en- 

 tangled with other matter as are more formal elements of 

 experience, such as extension, intensity, effort, pleasure, 

 difference, likeness, harmony, badness, strength, and even 

 consciousness itself. All are embedded in one world. But 

 by the fluctuations and permutations of which we have 

 spoken, we come to form a pretty good notion of the diy'ec- 

 tion in which each element differs from the rest, and so we 

 frame the notion of it as a termimis, and continue to mean 

 it as an individual thing. In the case of many elements, 

 the simple sensibles, like heat, cold, the colors, smells, etc., 

 the extremes of the directions are almost touched, and in 

 these instances we have a comparatively exact perception of 

 what it is we mean to abstract. But even this is only an 

 approximation ; and in literal mathematical strictness all 

 our abstracts must be confessed to be but imperfectly im- 

 aginable things. At bottom the process is one of concep- 

 tion, and is everywhere, even in the sphere of simple sensi- 

 ble qualities, the same as that by which Ave are usually 

 understood to attain to the notions of abstract goodness, 

 perfect felicity, absolute power, and the like : the direct 

 perception of a difference between compounds, and the 

 imaginary prolongation of the direction of the dift'erence to 

 an ideal terminus, the notion of which we fix and keej) aa 

 one of our permanent subjects of discourse. 



This is all that I can say usefully about abstraction, oi 

 about analysis, to which it leads. 



THE IMPROVEMENT OF DISCRIMINATION BY PRACTICE. 



In all the cases considered liitherto I have supposed 

 the differences involved to be so large as to be flagrant, and 

 the discrimination, where successive, was treated as invoL 

 untary. But, so far from being always involuntar}-, dis- 

 criminations are often difticult in the extreme, and by most 

 men never performed. Professor de Morgan, thinking, it 



