In the early 1980s, travellers on the M4 motorway into London, just before coming into Chiswick, could study a remarkable phenomenon. On the left is a row of terraced houses with slate-covered roofs, and on one of them was written, in large white capital letters: THE ROOF. I have no idea what the real significance of it could have been; for all I know, it might have advertised a punk-band. But the dozens of times it jolted me out of my morning drowsiness set my own train of thought in motion–which, naturally, is directly relevant to what we have been discussing. The universe is filled with things or phenomena which we, in our everyday lives, perceive merely as an amorphous collection, and not in their individuality. When philosophizing, we abstract even further and speculate on the genus or species, and not the individual object. We speak of ‘the human soul’, ‘the nature of aesthetic experience’, or ‘the world of phenomena’, but not of ‘the soul of Mr Smith’, etc. It is perhaps with reference to such generalizations that Canetti produced the biting aphorism: ‘Most philosophers have too limited a vision of the variety of human customs and potentials.’ THE ROOF can serve us as a reminder that, in spite of the existence of a set of millions and millions of very similar objects called ‘roofs’, the individual roof cannot be totally subsumed under the universality of the set.