imperfect embodiments of air and water multifarious, but special classes of embodiments are discovered as plants and animals distributed over all the earth in multitudinous kinds with multitudinous relations, and men as molar bodies are related to one another and in all of these relations men are fundamentally interested.
Relations, therefore, are so great in number and so many in kind that the subject of relations is apt to overwhelm the mental powers, for man discovers that in his reasoning he is forever dealing with relations far more than directly with the bodies themselves. In this manner he discovers that the world is a congress of molar bodies that are related to one another through their properties; when they are analyzed into related particles or synthesized into related bodies, relation seems to swallow all else, so that philosophers often assume and sometimes affirm that all that is known of the universe is these relations, and finally that the universe is only a system of relations and the substantiality of the universe is denied. The universe thus becomes a universe of relations without terms. The confounding of concomitancy with relativity is a cause of inextricable confusion—a snare to the intellect and a vice of logic. Unity and extension are concomitant but not related, while one unit may be related to another unit and one extension may be related to another extension. Concomitancy and relativity must always be distinguished or there can be no sound psychology. The antithesis of this doctrine is sometimes held, which is an affirmation that the substrates of the universe are unknown reifications of number, space, motion, time and
