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While the statement of the conceptualist seems to most minds simple and sufficient, the nominalist succeeds in obscuring the subject afresh by an appeal to the imagination. When we use the word horse, it is said, we cannot realize the idea back of it, save under the image of some individual horse. The word then differs only from Bucephalus in calling up many images instead of a single image. But this is the difference between the names, John Smith and Martin Van Buren. It seems plain that the mind can and does proceed without the accompanying imagery of the imagination, and that the fact of images is not the entire fact of classification, nor the very gist of it. If we know things only by perception and imagination, the nominalist is correct; but the entire reconstruction of the world through language, by which the thoughts pass away from and transcend the senses, is in contradiction of the assertion. It is sometimes said, that we cannot think without language. This would be true under nominalism, since words and things make up the sum of being, and we must handle either one or the other. Yet it is not true, the thought always precedes by a little the word, and words follow on to hold the ground gained. There is no more certain distinction than that between words and the meaning of words, the one giving occasion to the other. If common nouns have meaning, and that meaning is present to the mind, the conceptualist is correct. The by-play of the imagination does not alter the primary fact. The mind passes rapidly through page after page of abstract terms, and scarcely reverts once to any illustrative images. It has not, therefore, been unoccupied, or occupied only with words. The mind in judgment gets as certain a hold of single qualities, as it does in the senses of concrete groups. Take such a relation as that expressed by the conjunction in the sentences, You or I must do it, You and I must