ABSTRACT
The substantive and adjective is a time-honoured distinction and arrangement of facts, with a view to understand them and to arrive at reality. The attempt to resolve the thing into properties, each a real thing, taken somehow together with independent relations, has proved an obvious failure. Sugar is obviously not mere whiteness, mere hardness, and mere sweetness; for its reality lies somehow in its unity. But if, on the other hand, it is inquired what there can be in the thing beside its several qualities that are baffled once more. People can discover no real unity existing outside these qualities, or, again, existing within them. The immediate unity, in which facts come to us, has been broken up by experience, and later by reflection. The thing with its adjectives is a device for enjoying at once both variety and concord. But the distinctions, once made, fall apart from the thing, and away from one another.
