A Defence of Poetry • Paragraph 20
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Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous presumption that I, the person who now write and think, am that one mind. I am but a portion of it. The words _I_, and YOU, and THEY, are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement, and totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to them. It is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtle a conception as that to which the Intellectual Philosophy has conducted us. We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we know. The relations of THINGS remain unchanged, by whatever system. By the word THINGS is to be understood any object of thought, that is any thought upon which any other thought is employed, with an apprehension of distinction.