n which the rationalists appear to
have been in the right as against the empiricists, although, owing to
the neglect or denial of relations, the deductions made by rationalists
were, if anything, more apt to be mistaken than those made by
empiricists.

Having now seen that there must be such entities as universals, the next
point to be proved is that their being is not merely mental. By this is
meant that whatever being belongs to them is independent of their being
thought of or in any way apprehended by minds. We have already touched
on this subject at the end of the preceding chapter, but we must now
consider more fully what sort of being it is that belongs to universals.

Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we
have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation
subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that
Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to
do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the
proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a
fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface
where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands,
even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and
even if there were no minds at all in the universe. This is, of course,
denied by many philosophers, either for Berkeley's reasons or for
Kant's. But we have already considered these reasons, and decided that
they are inadequate. We may therefore now assume it to be true that
nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of
London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a
universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve
nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part
of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the
relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but
belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not
create.

This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation
'north of' does not seem to _exist_ in the same sense in which Edinburgh
and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?'
the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where
we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any
more