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that they almost all fall into one or other of two errors, as I hold them to be, that of setting aside the subject of abstractions, in the sense in which an abstract noun marks an abstraction, as a grammatical topic with which the logician need not particularly concern himself, and that of confounding abstraction, in this sense, with that operation of the mind by which we pay attention to one feature of a percept to the disregard of others. The two things are entirely disconnected. The most ordinary fact of perception, such as 'it is light' involves precisive abstraction, or prescission. But hypostatic abstraction, the abstraction which transforms 'it is light' into 'there is light here', which is the sense which I shall commonly attach to the moral abstraction (since prescission will do for precisive abstraction,) is a very special mode of