 According to several trope theorists, what exists when a trope does is an abstract particular. Williams—who coined the phrase—was also acutely aware of its potential to confuse. Tropes, he was careful to point out, although ‘abstract’ are not: “the product of a magical feat of mind”, “the denzien of some remote immaterial eternity”, “imprecise”, “the mental”, “the rational”, “the incorporeal”, “the ideally perfect”, “the non-temporal”, “the primordial or ultimate”, “the deficient”, “the potential”, “the unreal”, “the symbolic, figurative or merely representative”, or “the vague, confused and indefinite” (Williams, 1997[1953]: 121; cf. also his 1953: 174f.). This, he explained, is because the various senses people have given to the term ‘abstract’ can be traced back to two main sources—that which transcends individual existence and that which is partial, incomplete or fragmentary—where the source of the trope’s abstractness is of the latter kind only. Campbell agrees. According to him, more precisely, tropes are abstract because they “(ordinarily) occur in conjunction with many other instances of qualities”, which is why they can only be “brought before the mind…by a process of selection, of systematic setting aside, of these other qualities of which we are aware” (Campbell 1990: 2).