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creations of the mind.” In saying that, you mean one or
other of two things. You are either speaking as a metaphysician
or as an epistemologist. I neither affirm
nor deny what you say. I am simply talking logic. You
are thinking either of the nature of the being of qualities
or of the processes of human cognition. I have nothing to
do with either. I simply say that in order to avoid getting
wound up in your reasoning, you are to regard qualities
in a certain aspect. You need not say what they really
are nor what the genesis of the ideas is, but leaving that
quite aside you are to regard qualities as
eternal and immutable possibilities prior to existence
in the sense that no fact of existence can affect
in the least the qualities themselves. A collection is also
a possibility, a mere possibility. But it differs from