 Although secondary reflection is able to recoup the unity of experience that primary reflection dissects, it is possible that secondary reflection can be frustrated. One example of the frustration of secondary reflection and the mysterious is the functional person; however, this is really just one example of a more general phenomenon: the person who has given in to the “spirit of abstraction.” When we engage in primary reflection without proceeding to the synthesizing, recollecting act of secondary reflection, we fall victim to what Marcel calls the spirit of abstraction. “As soon as we accord to any category, isolated from all other categories, an arbitrary primacy, we are victims of the spirit of abstraction” (Marcel 1962b, pp.  155–156).[7]