110 
eminently “thinkable.” And if all metaphysical conceptions 
of all phenomena be ultimately reducible to an absurdity, it 
may possibly be that the true key to metaphysical science has 
as yet to be found.* The truth is, that one great mistake of 
metaphysics has been the assigning a real existence to abstract 
ideas. They are simply convenient formulae of classification, 
“ symbolic conceptions,” as Mr. Herbert Spencer calls them, 
which assist us in the process of reasoning, but simply mislead 
us when we substitute these general classification sf in the 
place of living intelligences. It has often been humorously 
said that the abstract man is a practical impossibility. He is 
utterly “ unthinkable.” He has not, and never could have, 
any real existence. For he must be neither short nor tall, 
fair nor dark, fat nor thin, young nor old, good nor bad. In 
fact, he is quite as impossible as Dean Mansel or Mr. Spencer's 
“Infinite” or “Absolute.” The necessity of such “symbolic 
conceptions” of man for the purposes of reasoning will 
not be denied. Yet, if we suppose these conceptions 
to correspond to anything having a real existence, we 
are speedily compelled to relegate them to the region of 
the unthinkable. And yet if those who are here present 
were to proceed, each one for himself, to conclude that 
every one else were “unknown and unknowable,” and were 
to resolve to have nothing whatever to do henceforward with 
the rest of our fellow-creatures, because the “ mystery we 
contemplate” in them “is ultimate and absolute,” the result 
would be a speedy catastrophe for humanity — and for ourselves. 
21. The fact is, that it is neither God nor man who is 
non-existent : it is the speculative conceptions we form of 
them. These speculative conceptions are purely subjective. 
That is to say, they have no real existence apart from the 
mind that conceives them. But real beings are essentially 
objective ; that is to say, they exist entirely independent of 
any conceptions whatsoever that are formed of them. They 
* As St. Augustine acutely remarks in his Confessions, book xi. 14, when 
replying to an inquiry for a definition of time, “ Si nemo ex me quaerat, 
scio ; si quserenti explicare velim, nescio.” We can often understand what 
language is inadequate to explain. 
t Or, as Kant calls them, the “ form-giving faculties, or, more accurately, 
those which give goal or aim to our reason.” Kuno Fischer ; see G. H. 
Lewes’s History of Philosophy, vol. ii. p. 503. It is not denied that there 
are conceptions which correspond to things really existing external to the 
mind conceiving them. What is denied is, that what are sometimes known 
as abstract conceptions, or, more properly speaking, generalisations of facts, 
have an objective existence. SeeHrote, Plato and Other Companions of 
Sohrates, vol. ii. p. 281. 
