be, isolated and abstracted from the total experience in which they appear, is the most indisputable function of our thought.

UNIVERSALS.

After abstractions, universals! The 'fringe,' which lets us believe in the one, lets us believe in the other too. An individual conception is of something restricted, in its application, to a single case. A universal or general conception is of an entire class, or of something belonging to an entire class, of things. The conception of an abstract quality is, taken by itself, neither universal nor particular.* If I abstract white from the rest of the wintry landscape this morning, it is a perfectly definite conception, a selfidentical quality which I may mean again; but, as I have not yet individualized it by expressly meaning to restrict it to this particular snow, nor thought at all of the possibility of other things to which it may be applicable, it is so far nothing but a 'that,' a 'floating adjective,' as Mr. Bradley calls it, or a topic broken out from the rest of the world. Properly it is, in this state, a singular-I have 'singled it out;' and when, later, I universalize or individualize its application, and my thought turns to mean either this white or all possible whites, I am in reality meaning two new things and forming two new conceptions.† Such an alteration of my meaning has nothing to do with any change in the image I may have in my mental eye, but solely with the vague consciousness that surrounds the image, of the sphere to which it is intended to apply. We can give no more definite account of this vague conscious

*The traditional conceptualist doctrine is that an abstract must eo ipso be a universal. Even modern and independent authors like Prof. Dewey (Psychology, 207) obey the tradition: "The mind seizes upon some one aspect,... abstracts or prescinds it. This very seizure of some one element generalizes the one abstracted. . . . Attention, in drawing it forth, makes it a distinct content of consciousness, and thus universalizes it; it is considered no longer in its particular connection with the object, but on its own account; that is, as an idea, or what it signifies to the mind; and significance is always universal."

C. F. Reid's Intellectual Powers, Essay v. chap. m.-Whiteness is one thing, the whiteness of this sheet of paper another thing.

ness than has been given on pp. 249-266. But that is no reason for denying its presence.*

*

But the nominalists and traditional conceptualists find matter for an inveterate quarrel in these simple facts. Full of their notion that an idea, feeling, or state of consciousness can at bottom only be aware of its own quality; and agreeing, as they both do, that such an idea or state of consciousness is a perfectly determinate, singular, and transitory thing; they find it impossible to conceive how it should become the vehicle of a knowledge of anything permanent or universal. "To know a universal, it must be universal; for like can only be known by like," etc. Unable to reconcile these incompatibles, the knower and the known, each side immolates one of them to save the other. The nominalists 'settle the hash' of the thing known by denying it to be ever a genuine universal; the conceptualists despatch the knower by denying it to be a state of mind, in the sense of being a perishing segment of thoughts' stream, consubstantial with other facts of sensibility. They invent, instead of it, as the vehicle of the knowledge of universals, an actus purus intellectus, or an Ego, whose function is treated as quasi-miraculous and nothing if not aweinspiring, and which it is a sort of blasphemy to approach with the intent to explain and make common, or reduce to lower terms. Invoked in the first instance as a vehicle for the knowledge of universals, the higher principle presently is made the indispensable vehicle of all thinking whatever, for, it is contended, "a universal element is present in every thought." The nominalists meanwhile, who dislike

* Mr. F. H. Bradley says the conception or the 'meaning "consists of a part of the content, cut off, fixed by the mind, and considered apart from the existence of the sign. It would not be correct to add, and referred away to another real subject; for where we think without judging. and where we deny, that description would not be applicable." This seems to be the same doctrine as ours; the application to one or to all subjects of the abstract fact conceived (i.e. its individuality or its universality), constituting a new conception. I am, however, not quite sure that Mr. Bradley steadily maintains this ground. Cf. the first chapter of his Principles of Logic. The doctrine I defend is stoutly upheld in Rosmini's Philosophical System, Introduction by Thomas Davidson, p. 43 (London,

actus puros and awe-inspiring principles and despise the reverential mood, content themselves with saying that we are mistaken in supposing we ever get sight of the face of an universal; and that what deludes us is nothing but the swarm of 'individual ideas' which may at any time be awakened by the hearing of a name.

If we open the pages of either school, we find it impossible to tell, in all the whirl about universal and particular, when the author is talking about universals in the mind, and when about objective universals, so strangely are the two mixed together. James Ferrier, for example, is the most brilliant of anti-nominalist writers. But who is nimble-witted enough to count, in the following sentences from him, the number of times he steps from the known to the knower, and attributes to both whatever properties he finds in either one? "To think is to pass from the singular or particular to the idea [concept] or universal. Ideas are necessary because no thinking can take place without them. They are universal, inasmuch as they are completely divested of the particularity which characterizes all the phenomena of mere sensation. To grasp the nature of this universality is not easy. Perhaps the best means by which this end may be compassed is by contrasting it with the particular. It is not difficult to understand that a sensation, a phenomenon of sense, is never more than the particular which it is. As such, that is, in its strict particularity, it is absolutely unthinkable. In the very act of being thought, something more than it emerges, and this something more cannot be again the particular. . . . Ten particulars per se cannot be thought of any more than one particular can be thought of; . . . there always emerges in thought an additional something, which is the possibility of other particulars to an indefinite extent. . . . The indefinite additional something which they are instances of is a universal. . . . The idea or universal cannot possibly be pictured in the imagination, for this would at once reduce it to the particular. . . . This inability to form any sort of picture or representation of an idea does not proceed from any imperfection or limitation of our faculties, but is a quality inherent in the very nature of intelligence. A contradiction is involved in the supposition that an idea or a universal can become the object either of sense or of the imagination. An idea is thus diametrically opposed to an image."*

...

The nominalists, on their side, admit a quasi-universal, something which we think as if it were universal, though it

* Lectures on Greek Philosophy, pp. 33-39.

is not; and in all that they say about this something, which they explain to be an indefinite number of particular ideas,' the same vacillation between the subjective and the objective points of view appears. The reader never can tell whether an 'idea' spoken of is supposed to be a knower or a known. The authors themselves do not distinguish. They want to get something in the mind which shall resemble what is out of the mind, however vaguely, and they think that when that fact is accomplished, no farther questions will be asked. James Mill writes:*

"The word, man, we shall say, is first applied to an individual; it is first associated with the idea of that individual, and acquires the power of calling up the idea of him; it is next applied to another individual and acquires the power of calling up the idea of him; so of another and another, till it has become associated with an indefinite number, and has acquired the power of calling up an indefinite number of those ideas indifferently. What happens? It does call up an indefinite number of the ideas of individuals as often as it occurs; and calling them in close connection, it forms a species of complex idea of them. . . . It is also a fact, that when an idea becomes to a certain extent complex, from the multiplicity of the ideas it comprehends, it is of necessity indistinct; . . . and this indistinctness has, doubtless, been a main cause of the mystery which has appeared to belong to it. . . . It thus appears that the word man is not a word having a very simple idea, as was the opinion of the realists; nor a word having no idea at all, as was that of the [earlier] nominalists; but a word calling up an indefinite number of ideas, by the irresistible laws of association, and forming them into one very complex and indistinct, but not therefore unintelligible, idea."

Berkeley had already said:†

A word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an abstract general idea, but of many several particular ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the mind. An idea which, considered in itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort."

Stand for,' not know; becomes general,' not becomes aware of something general; particular ideas,' not particular things-everywhere the same timidity about begging the fact of knowing, and the pitifully impotent attempt to foist it in the shape of a mode of being of ideas.' If

Analysis, chap. VIII.

Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§ 11, 12.

the fact to be conceived be the indefinitely numerous actual and possible members of a class, then it is assumed that if we can only get enough ideas to huddle together for a moment in the mind, the being of each several one of them there will be an equivalent for the knowing, or meaning, of one member of the class in question; and their number will be so large as to confuse our tally and leave it doubtful whether all the possible members of the class have thus been satisfactorily told off or not.

.

Of course this is nonsense. An idea neither is what it knows, nor knows what it is; nor will swarms of copies of the same idea,' recurring in stereotyped form, or by the irresistible laws of association formed into one idea,' ever be the same thing as a thought of all the possible members' of a class. We must mean that by an altogether special bit of consciousness ad hoc. But it is easy to translate Berkeley's, Hume's, and Mill's notion of a swarm of ideas into cerebral terms, and so to make them stand for something real; and, in this sense, I think the doctrine of these authors less hollow than the opposite one which makes the vehicle of universal conceptions to be an actus purus of the soul. If each idea' stand for some special nascent nerve-process, then the aggregate of these nascent processes might have for its conscious correlate a psychic fringe,' which should be just that universal meaning, or intention that the name or mental picture employed should mean all the possible individuals of the class. Every peculiar complication of brain-processes must have some peculiar correlate in the soul. To one set of processes will correspond the thought of an indefinite taking of the extent of a word like man; to another set that of a particular taking; and to a third set that of a universal taking, of the extent of the same word. The thought corresponding to either set of processes, is always itself a unique and singular event, whose dependence on its peculiar nerve-process I of course am far from professing to explain.*

*It may add to the effect of the text to quote a passage from the essay in 'Mind,' referred to on p. 224.

"Why may we not side with the conceptualists in saying that the universal sense of a word does correspond to a mental fact of some kind, but