than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between
them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now
everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection
exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is
radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in
time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something.

It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals
which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We
can think _of_ a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly
ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that
we are thinking of whiteness. Then _in one sense_ it may be said that
whiteness is 'in our mind'. We have here the same ambiguity as we noted
in discussing Berkeley in Chapter IV. In the strict sense, it is not
whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The
connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time,
also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense
in which it denotes the _object_ of an act of thought, whiteness is an
'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to
think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of
thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so
thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's
act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one
man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from
the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were
the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think
of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different
thoughts of whiteness have in common is their _object_, and this object
is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though
when known they are the objects of thoughts.

We shall find it convenient only to speak of things _existing_ when they
are in time, that is to say, when we can point to some time at which
they exist (not excluding the possibility of their existing at all
times). Thus thoughts and feelings, minds and physical objects exist.
But universals do not exist in this sense; we shall say that they
_subsist_ or _have being_, where 'being' is opposed to 'existence'
as being timeless. The world of universals, the