False Abstraction

False Abstraction

Coins cannot exist as coins except as pocketed and owned; at the same time they imply an essential tendency to pass into the
pockets of other men : for a coin that could not issue
from the pocket would be a coin in name only, and not in
function. When it actually passes from one man's pocket
into another's, this circumstance, far from justifying us
in thinking the coin a separable thing, shows that all
men s pockets (when not empty and therefore, in function,
not pockets at all) are intrinsically related and, in a higher
sense, one and the same purse. Therefore, we may conclude,
it was not the sly transference of the coin from
my neighbor's pocket into mine that was the wrongful
abstraction, but only the false supposition that if the coin
was his it was not, by right of eminent domain, mine
also. A man, in so far as he is the possessor of coins, is
simply a pocket, and all pockets, in so far as there is
transferable coin in them, are one pocket together.

from 'The British Hegelians' by Santayana