 If Cook Wilson’s reverence towards ordinary language derived from his training as a philologist, it was not limited to occasional references to instances of usage to buttress his arguments. He believed that in philosophy one must above all “uncompromisingly […] try to find out what a given activity of thought presupposes as implicit or explicit in our consciousness”, i.e., to “try to get at the facts of consciousness and not let them be overlaid as is so commonly done with preconceived theories” (SI, 328). He also spoke of the latter as originating in ‘reflective thought’ and argued it has two major defects. First, it is based on principles that, for all we know, might be false and, concomitantly, it is too abstract, because it is not based on the consideration of particular concrete examples. Indeed, in a passage where he criticized Bradley’s regress arguments against the reality of relations (Bradley 1897, chap. III), Cook Wilson begins by pointing out that “throughout this chapter there is not a single illustration, though it is of the last importance that there should be” (SI, 692). (On this critique of Bradley, see also Joseph (1916a, 37).) This is, however, slightly misleading, given that Bradley opens his discussion in his previous chapter, where a first regress is deployed, with the case of a lump of sugar (Bradley 1897, 16).) As H. H. Price put it later, for Cook Wilson and his epigones “to philosophize without instances would be merely a waste of time” (Price 1947, 336).