Note 176 — Chapter VI · METAPHOR.

“It is remarked by a great metaphysician, that abstract ideas are, in one point of view, the highest and most philosophical of all our ideas, while in another they are the shallowest and most meagre. They have the advantage of clearness and definiteness; they enable us to conceive and, as it were, to span the infinity of things; they arrange, as it might be in the divisions of a glass, the many-coloured world of phenomena. And yet they are ‘mere’ abstractions, removed from sense, removed from experience, and detached from the mind in which they arose. Their perfection consists, as their very name implies, in their idealism; that is, in their negative nature.”—Jowett on Romans, &c., ii. 88.