I believe that abstraction is recursive in nature which creates multiple layers of abstract ideas leading to new areas or insights. For instance our understanding of continuity and limit led to calculus, which when tied to the (abstract) idea of linearity led to the idea of linear operator which explains various phenomena in the real world surprisingly well.
You could say that abstraction is a step or a ladder: by climbing on an abstraction you can see new goals and opportunities, possibly out of reach until you build yet new steps.
