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question, why opium puts people to sleep, by saying that it is because it has a dormitive virtue. This an answer that: no death carries vagueness to its last extreme. Yet, invented as the story was to show how little meaning there might be in any abstraction, nevertheless the physician's answer does contain a truth that modern philosophy has generally denied: it does assert that there really is in opium something which explains its always putting people to sleep. This has, I say, been denied by modern philosophers generally. Not, of course, explicitly; but when they say that the different events of people going to sleep after taking opium have really nothing in common, but only that the mind classes them together; - and this is what they virtually do say in denying the reality of generals; - they do implicitly deny that there is any true explanation of opium's generally putting people to sleep.

Look through the modern logical treatises, and you will find