Note (return) — Chapter VII

This principle is based upon a distinction between "positive" and "negative" thought, which is made with an air of wonderful precision and accuracy in "the Alphabet of Human Thought." 333 "Thinking is positive when existence is predicated of an object." "Thinking is negative when existence is not attributed to an object." "Negative thinking," therefore, is not the thinking of an object as devoid of this or that particular attribute, but as devoid of all attributes, and thus of all existence; that is, it is "the negation of all thought"--nothing. "When we think a thing, that is done by conceiving it as possessed of certain modes of being or qualities, and the sum of these qualities constitutes its concept or notion." "When we perform an act of negative thought, this is done by thinking something as not existing in this or that determinate mode; and when we think it as existing in no determinate mode, we cease to think at all--it becomes a nothing." 334 Now the Infinite, according to Hamilton, can not be thought in any determinate mode; therefore we do not think it at all, and therefore it is for us "a logical Non-entity."