The whole subject deserves to be gone over again. To Wundt is due the highest credit for his patience in working out the facts. His explanation of them in his earlier work (Vorlesungen üb. Menschen und Thierseele, i, 37-42, 365-371) consisted merely in the appeal to the unity of consciousness, and may be considered quite crude.
[338] Note that the permanent interests are themselves grounded in certain objects and relations in which our interest is immediate and instinctive.
[339] Herbart: Psychologie als Wissenschaft, § 128.
[340] Sir W. Hamilton. Metaphysics, lecture xiv.
[341] Mental Physiol., § 124. The oft-cited case of soldiers not perceiving that they are wounded is of an analogous sort.
[342] Prof. J. M. Cattell made experiments to which we shall refer further on, on the degree to which reaction-times might be shortened by distracting or voluntarily concentrating the attention. He says of the latter series that "the averages show that the attention can be kept strained, that is, the centres kept in a state of unstable equilibrium, for one second" (Mind, xi, 240).
[344] "'Genius,' says Helvetius, 'is nothing but a continued attention (_une attention suivie_).' 'Genius,' says Buffon, 'is only a protracted patience (_une longue patience_).' 'In the exact sciences, at least,' says Cuvier, 'it is the patience of a sound intellect, when invincible, which truly constitutes genius.' And Chesterfield has also observed that 'the power of applying an attention, steady and undissipated, to a single object, is the sure mark of a superior genius.'" (Hamilton: Lect. on Metaph., lecture xiv.)
[345] See, e.g., Ulrici: Leib u. Seele, ii, 28; Lotze: Metaphysik, § 273; Fechner, Revision d. Psychophysik, xix; G. E. Müller: Zur Theorie [348] Compare, on clearness as the essential fruit of attention, [349] Elements, part i, chap. ii.
[350] Physiol. Psych., 2d ed. ii, 226.
[351] By a negative value of the reaction-time Wundt means the case of the reactive movement occurring _before_ the stimulus.
[353] The reader must not suppose this phenomenon to be of frequent occurrence. Experienced observers, like Exner and Cattell, deny having met with it in their personal experience.
[355] It should be added that Mr. J. M. Cattell (Mind, xi, 33) found, on repeating Wundt's experiments with a disturbing noise upon two practised observers, that the simple reaction-time either for light or sound was hardly perceptibly increased. Making strong voluntary concentration of attention shortened it by about 0.013 seconds on an average (p. 240). Performing mental additions whilst waiting for the stimulus lengthened it more than anything, apparently. For other, less careful, observations, compare Obersteiner, in Brain, i, 439.
Cattell's negative results show how far some persons can abstract their attention from stimuli by which others would be disturbed.--A. Bartels (Versuche über die Ablenkung d. Aufmerksamkeit, Dorpat, 1889) found that a stimulus to one eye sometimes prevented, sometimes improved, the perception of a quickly ensuing very faint stimulus to the other.
[356] Cf. Wundt, Physiol. Psych., 1st ed. p. 794.
[357] Beiträge zur Experimentellen Psychologie, Heft i, pp. 73-106 (1889).
[358] To say the very least, he always brought his articulatory innervation close to the discharging point. Herr M. describes a tightening of the head-muscles as characteristic of the attitude of attention to the reply.
[359] Psychophysik, Bd. ii, pp. 475-6.
[360] I must say that I am wholly unconscious of the peculiar feelings in the scalp which Fechner goes on to describe. "The feeling of strained attention in the different sense-organs seems to be only a muscular one produced in using these various organs by setting in motion, by a sort of reflex action, the muscles which belong to them.
One can ask, then, with what particular muscular contraction the sense of strained attention in the effort to recall something is associated?
On this question my own feeling gives me a decided answer; it comes to me distinctly, not as a sensation of tension in the inside of the head, but as a feeling of strain and contraction in the scalp with a pressure from without inwards over the whole cranium, undoubtedly caused by a contraction of the muscles of the scalp. This harmonizes very well with the German popular expression _den Kopf zusammennehmen_, etc., etc. In a former illness, in which I could not endure the slightest effort of continuous thought, and had no theoretical bias on this question, the muscles of the scalp, especially those of the occiput, assumed a fairly morbid degree of sensibility whenever I tried to _think_." (_Ibid._ pp. 490-491.) In an early writing by Professor Mach, after speaking of the way in which by attention we decompose complex musical sounds into their elements, this investigator continues: "It is more than a figure of speech when one says that we 'search' among the sounds.
This hearkening search is very observably a bodily activity, just like attentive looking in the case of the eye. If, obeying the drift of physiology, we understand by attention nothing mystical, but a bodily disposition, it is most natural to seek it in the variable tension of the muscles of the ear. Just so, what common men call attentive looking reduces itself mainly to accommodating and setting of the optic axes...According to this, it seems to me a very plausible view that quite generally Attention has its seat in the mechanism of the body. If nervous work is being done through certain channels, that by itself is a mechanical ground for other channels being closed." (Wien.
Sitzungsberichte, Math. Naturw., xlviii, 2, 297. 1863.)
[363] Helmholtz: Tonempfindungen, 3d ed. 85-9 (Engl. tr., 2d ed. 50, 51; see also pp. 60-1).
[364] Physiol. Psych., ii, 209.
[365] Physiol. Optik, 741.
[366] P. 728.
[367] Popular Scientific Lectures, Eng. Trans., p. 295.
[368] Similarly in the verses which some one tried to puzzle me with the other day: "_Gui n'a beau dit, qui sabot dit, nid a beau dit elle?_" [369] I cannot refrain from referring in a note to an additional set of facts instanced by Lotze in his Medizinische Psychologie, § 431, although I am not satisfied with the explanation, fatigue of the sense-organ, which _he_ gives. "In quietly lying and contemplating a wall-paper pattern, sometimes it is the ground, sometimes the design, which is clearer and consequently comes nearer...Arabesques of monochromic many-convoluted lines now strike us as composed of one, now of another connected linear system, and all without any intention on our part. [This is beautifully seen in Moorish patterns; but a simple diagram like Fig. 39 also shows it well. We see it sometimes as two large triangles superposed, sometimes as a hexagon with angles spanning its sides, sometimes as six small triangles stuck together at their corners.]...Often it happens in revery that when we stare at a picture, suddenly some one of its features will be lit up with especial clearness, although neither its optical character nor its meaning discloses any motive for such an arousal of the attention...To one in process of becoming drowsy the surroundings alternately fade into darkness and abruptly brighten up. The talk of the bystanders seems now to come from indefinite distances; but at the next moment it startles us by its threatening loudness at our very ear," etc. These variations, which everyone will have noticed, are, it seems to me, easily explicable by the very unstable equilibrium of our ideational centres, of which constant change is the law. We _conceive_ one set of lines as object, the other as background, and forthwith the first set becomes the set we _see_. There need be no _logical_ motive for the conceptual change, the irradiations of brain-tracts by each other, according to accidents of nutrition, 'like sparks in burnt-up paper,' suffice. The changes during drowsiness are still more obviously due to this cause.
[370] The Emotions and the Will, 3d ed. p. 370.
[372] Philosophische Studien, iv, 413 ff.
[373] See Lange, _loc. cit._ p. 417, for another proof of his view, drawn from the phenomenon of retinal rivalry.
[374] Many of my students have at my request experimented with imagined letters of the alphabet and syllables, and they tell me that they can see them inwardly as total colored pictures without following their outlines with the eye. I am myself a bad visualizer, and make movements all the while.--M. L. Marillier, in an article of eminent introspective power which appeared after my text was written (Remarques sur le Mécanisme de l'Attention, in Revue Philosophique, vol. xxvii, p.
566), has contended against Ribot and others for the non-dependence of sensory upon motor images in their relations to attention. I am glad to cite him as an ally.
[375] Drs. Ferrier (Functions of the Brain, §§ 102-3) and Obersteiner (Brain, i, 439 ff.) treat it as the essential feature. The author whose treatment of the subject is by far the most thorough and satisfactory is Prof. G. E. Müller, whose little work Zur Théorie der sinnlichen Aufmerksamkeit, Inauguraldissertation, Leipzig, Edelmann (1874?), is for learning and acuteness a model of what a monograph should be. I should like to have quoted from it, but the Germanism of its composition makes quotation quite impossible. See also G. H.
Lewes: Problems of Life and Mind, 3d Series, Prob. 2, chap. 10; G.
H. Schneider: Der menschliche Wille, 294 ff., 309 ff.; C. Stumpf: Tonpsychologie, i, 67-75; W. B. Carpenter: Mental Physiology, chap. 3; Cappie in 'Brain,' July 1886 (hyperæmia-theory); J. Sully in 'Brain,' Oct. 1890.
[378] Repetition of this sort does not confer _intelligence_ of what is said, it only keeps the mind from wandering into other channels.
The intelligence sometimes comes in beats, as it were, at the end of sentences, or in the midst of words which were mere words until then.
See above, p. 281.
[379] The reader will please observe that I am saying all that can _possibly_ be said in favor of the effect-theory, since, inclining as I do myself to the cause-theory, I do not want to undervalue the enemy. As a matter of fact, one might begin to take one's stand against the effect theory at the outset, with the phenomenon of immediate sensorial attention. One might say that attention causes the movements of adjustment of the eyes, for example, and is not merely their effect.
Hering writes most emphatically to this effect: "The movements from one point of fixation to another are occasioned and regulated by the changes of place of the attention. When an object, seen at first indirectly, draws our attention to itself, the corresponding movement of the eye follows without further ado, as a consequence of the attention's migration and of our effort to make the object distinct.
The wandering of the attention entails that of the fixation point.
Before its movement begins, its goal is already in consciousness and grasped by the attention, and the location of this spot in the total space seen is what determines the direction and amount of the movement of the eye." (Hermann's Handbuch, p. 534.) I do not here insist on this, because it is hard to tell whether the attention or the movement comes first (Hering's reasons, pp. 535-6, also 544-6, seem to me ambiguous), and because, even if the attention to the object does come first, it may be a mere effect of stimulus and association. Mach's theory that the _will to look_ is the _space-feeling itself_ may be compared with Hering's in this place. See Mach's Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (1886), pp. 55 ff.
[380] F. H. Bradley, "Is there a Special Activity of Attention?" in 'Mind,' xi, 305, and Lipps, Grundtatsachen, chaps. iv and xxx, have stated it similarly.
[381] More will be said of the matter when we come to the chapter on the Will.
[382] See, for a defence of the notion of inward activity, Mr. James Ward's searching articles in 'Mind,' xii, 45 and 564.
[383] It must be admitted that some little time will often elapse before this effort succeeds. As a child, I slept in a nursery with a very loud-ticking clock, and remember my astonishment more than once, on listening for its tick, to find myself unable to catch it for what seemed a long space of time; then suddenly it would break into my consciousness with an almost startling loudness.--M. Delbœuf somewhere narrates how, sleeping in the country near a mill-dam, he woke in the night and thought the water had ceased to flow, but on looking out of the open window saw it flowing in the moonlight, and then heard it too.
[384] Zur Theorie d. sinnl. Aufmerksamkeit, p. 128 foll.
[385] I have begun to inquire experimentally whether any of the measurable functions of the workmen change after the din of machinery stops at a workshop. So far I have found no constant results as regards either pulse, breathing, or strength of squeeze by the hand. I hope to prosecute the inquiry farther (May, 1890).
CHAPTER XII.
CONCEPTION.
THE SENSE OF SAMENESS.
In Chapter VIII, p. 221, the distinction was drawn between two kinds of knowledge of things, bare acquaintance with them and knowledge about them. The possibility of two such knowledges depends on a fundamental psychical peculiarity which may be entitled "_the principle of constancy in the mind's meanings_" and which may be thus expressed: "_The same matters can be thought of in successive portions of the mental stream, and some of these portions can know that they mean the same matters which the other portions meant._" One might put it otherwise by saying that "_the mind can always intend, and know when it intends, to think of the Same._" This _sense of sameness_ is the very keel and backbone of our thinking.
We saw in Chapter X how the consciousness of personal identity reposed on it, the present thought finding in its memories a warmth and intimacy which it recognizes as the same warmth and intimacy it now feels. This sense of identity of the knowing subject is held by some philosophers to be the only vehicle by which the world hangs together.
It seems hardly necessary to say that a sense of identity of the known object would perform exactly the same unifying function, even if the sense of subjective identity were lost. And without the intention to think of the same outer things over and over again, and the sense that we were doing so, our sense of our own personal sameness would carry us but a little way towards making a universe of our experience.
Note, however, that we are in the first instance speaking of the sense of sameness from the point of view of the mind's structure alone, and not from the point of view of the universe. We are psychologizing, not philosophizing, That is, we do not care whether there be any _real_ sameness in _things_ or not, or whether the mind be true or false in its assumptions of it. Our principle only lays it down that the mind makes continual use of the _notion_ of sameness, and if deprived of it, would have a different structure from what it has. In a word, the principle that the mind can mean the Same is true of its _meanings_, but not necessarily of aught besides.[386] The mind must conceive as possible that the Same should be before it, for our experience to be the sort of thing it is. Without the psychological sense of identity, sameness might rain down upon us from the outer world for ever and we be none the wiser. With the psychological sense, on the other hand, the outer world might be an unbroken flux, and yet we should perceive a repeated experience. Even now, the world may be a place in which the same thing never did and never will come twice. The thing we mean to point at may change from top to bottom and we be ignorant of the fact. But in our meaning itself we are not deceived; our intention is to think of the same. The name which I have given to the principle, in calling it the law of constancy in our meanings, accentuates its subjective character, and justifies us in laying it down as the most important of all the features of our mental structure.
Not all psychic life need be assumed to have the sense of sameness developed in this way. In the consciousness of worms and polyps, though the same realities may frequently impress it, the feeling of sameness may seldom emerge. We, however, running back and forth, like spiders on the web they weave, feel ourselves to be working over identical materials and thinking them in different ways. And the man who identifies the materials most is held to have the most philosophic human mind.
CONCEPTION DEFINED.
_The function by which we thus identify a numerically distinct and permanent subject of discourse is called_ CONCEPTION; and the thoughts which are its vehicles are called _concepts_. But the word 'concept' is often used as if it stood for the object of discourse itself; and this looseness feeds such evasiveness in discussion that I shall avoid the use of the expression concept altogether, and speak of 'conceiving state of mind,' or something similar, instead. The word 'conception' is unambiguous. It properly denotes neither the mental state nor what the mental state signifies, but the relation between the two, namely, the _function_ of the mental state in signifying just that particular thing. It is plain that one and the same mental state can be the vehicle of many conceptions, can mean a particular thing, and a great deal more besides. If it has such a multiple conceptual function, it may be called an act of compound conception.
We may conceive realities supposed to be extra-mental, as steam-engine; fictions, as mermaid; or mere _entia rationis_, like difference or nonentity. But whatever we do conceive, our conception is of that and nothing else--nothing else, that is, _instead_ of that, though it may be of much else _in addition_ to that. Each act of conception results from our attention singling out some one part of the mass of matter for thought which the world presents, and holding fast to it, without confusion.[387] Confusion occurs when we do not know whether a certain object proposed to us is the same with one of our meanings or not; so that the conceptual function requires, to be complete, that the thought should not only say 'I mean this,' but also say 'I don't mean that.'[388] Each conception thus eternally remains what it is, and never can become another. The mind may change its states, and its meanings, at different times; may drop one conception and take up another, but the dropped conception can in no intelligible sense be said to _change into_ its successor. The paper, a moment ago white, I may now see to have been scorched black. But my conception 'white' does not change into my conception 'black.' On the contrary, it stays alongside of the objective blackness, as a different meaning in my mind, and by so doing lets me judge the blackness as the paper's change. Unless it stayed, I should simply say 'blackness' and know no more. Thus, amid the flux of opinions and of physical things, the world of conceptions, or things intended to be thought about, stands stiff and immutable, like Plato's Realm of Ideas.[389] Some conceptions are of things, some of events, some of qualities. Any fact, be it thing, event, or quality, may be conceived sufficiently for purposes of identification, if only it be singled out and marked so as to separate it from other things. Simply calling it 'this' or 'that' will suffice. To speak in technical language, a subject may be conceived by its _denotation_, with no _connotation_, or a very minimum of connotation, attached. The essential point is that it should be re-identified by us as that which the talk is about; and no full representation of it is necessary for this, even when it is a fully representable thing.
In this sense, creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hollo! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
Most of the objects of our thought, however, are to some degree represented as well as merely pointed out. Either they are things and events perceived or imagined, or they are qualities apprehended in a positive way. Even where we have no intuitive acquaintance with the nature of a thing, if we know any of the relations of it at all, anything _about_ it, that is enough to individualize and distinguish it from all the other things which we might mean. Many of our topics of discourse are thus _problematical_, or defined by their relations only. We think of a thing _about_ which certain facts must obtain, but we do not yet know how the thing will look when it is realized.
Thus we conceive of a perpetual-motion machine. It is a _quæsitum_ of a perfectly definite kind,--we can always tell whether the actual machines offered us do or do not agree with what we mean by it. The natural possibility or impossibility of the thing does not touch the question of its conceivability in this problematic way. 'Round square,' 'black-white-thing,' are absolutely definite conceptions; it is a mere accident, as far as conception goes, that they happen to stand for things which nature never lets us sensibly perceive.[390] CONCEPTIONS ARE UNCHANGEABLE.
The fact that the same real topic of discourse is at one time conceived as a mere 'that' or 'that which, etc.,' and is at another time conceived with additional specifications, has been treated by many authors as a proof that conceptions themselves are fertile and self-developing. A conception, according to the Hegelizers in philosophy, 'develops its own significance,' 'makes explicit what it implicitly contained,' passes, on occasion, 'over into its opposite,' and in short loses altogether the blankly self-identical character we supposed it to maintain. The figure we viewed as a polygon appears to us now as a sum of juxtaposed triangles; the number hitherto conceived as thirteen is at last noticed to be six plus seven, or prime; the man thought honest is believed a rogue. Such changes of our opinion are viewed by these thinkers as evolutions of our conception, from within.
The facts are unquestionable; our knowledge does grow and change by rational and inward processes, as well as by empirical discoveries.
Where the discoveries are empirical, no one pretends that the propulsive agency, the force that makes the knowledge develop, is mere conception. All admit it to be our continued exposure to the _thing_, with its power to impress our senses. Thus strychnin, which tastes bitter, we find will also kill, etc. Now I say that where the new knowledge merely comes from _thinking_, the facts are essentially the same, and that _to talk of self-development on the part of our conceptions is a very bad way of stating the case_. Not new sensations, as in the empirical instance, but new conceptions, are the indispensable conditions of advance.
For if the alleged cases of self-development be examined it will be found, I believe, that the new truth affirms in every case a _relation_ between the original subject of conception and some new subject conceived later on. These new subjects of conception arise in various ways. Every one of our conceptions is of something which our attention originally tore out of the continuum of felt experience, and provisionally isolated so as to make of it an individual topic of discourse. Every one of them has a way, if the mind is left alone with it, of suggesting other parts of the continuum from which it was torn, for conception to work upon in a similar way. This 'suggestion' is often no more than what we shall later know as the association of ideas. Often, however, it is a sort of invitation to the mind to play, add lines, break number-groups, etc. Whatever it is, it brings new conceptions into consciousness, which latter thereupon may or may not expressly attend to the relation in which the new stands to the old. Thus I have a conception of equidistant lines. Suddenly, I know not whence, there pops into my head the conception of their meeting.
Suddenly again I think of the meeting and the equidistance both together, and perceive them incompatible. "_Those_ lines will never meet," I say. Suddenly again the word 'parallel' pops into my head.
'They are parallels,' I continue; and so on. Original conceptions to start with; adventitious conceptions pushed forward by multifarious psychologic causes; comparisons and combinations of the two; resultant conceptions to end with; which latter may be of either rational or empirical relations.
As regards these relations, they are conceptions of the second degree, as one might say, and their birthplace is the mind itself. In Chapter XXVIII I shall at considerable length defend the mind's claim to originality and fertility in bringing them forth. But no single one of the mind's conceptions is fertile _of itself_ as the opinion which I criticise pretends. When the several notes of a chord are sounded together, we get a new feeling from their combination. This feeling is due to the mind reacting upon that group of sounds in that determinate way, and no one would think of saying of any single note of the chord that it 'developed' of itself into the other notes or into the feeling of harmony. So of Conceptions. No one of them develops into any other.
But if two of them are thought at once, their _relation_ may come to consciousness, and form matter for a third conception.
Take 'thirteen' for example, which is said to develop into 'prime.'
What really happens is that we compare the utterly changeless conception of thirteen with various other conceptions, those of the different multiples of two, three, four, five, and six, and ascertain that it _differs_ from them all. Such difference is a freshly ascertained relation. It is only for mere brevity's sake that we call it a property of the original thirteen, the property of being prime.
We shall see in the next chapter that (if we count out æsthetic and moral relations between things) the only important relations of which the mere inspection of conceptions makes us aware are relations of comparison, that is, of difference and no-difference, between them. The judgment 6 + 7 = 13 expresses the relation of _equality_ between two ideal objects, 13 on the one hand and 6 + 7 on the other, successively express in like manner relations of inequality between ideal objects.
But if it be unfair to say that the conception of 6 + 7 generates that of 12 or of 14, surely it is as unfair to say that it generates that of 13.
The conceptions of 12, 13, and 14 are each and all generated by individual acts of the mind, playing with its materials. When, comparing two ideal objects, we find them equal, the conception of one of them may be that of a whole and of the other that of all its parts.
This particular case is, it seems to me, the only case which makes the notion of one conception evolving into another sound plausible.
But even in this case the conception, as such, of the whole does not evolve into the conception, as such, of the parts. Let the conception of some object as a whole be given first. To begin with, it points to and identifies for future thought a certain _that_. The 'whole' in question might be one of those mechanical puzzles of which the difficulty is to unlock the parts. In this case, nobody would pretend that the richer and more elaborate conception which we gain of the puzzle after solving it came directly out of our first crude conception of it, for it is notoriously the outcome of experimenting with our hands. It is true that, as they both mean _that same puzzle_, our earlier thought and our later thought have one conceptual function, are vehicles of one conception. But in addition to being the vehicle of this bald unchanging conception, 'that same puzzle,' the later thought is the vehicle of all those other conceptions which it took the manual experimentation to acquire. Now, it is just the same where the whole is mathematical instead of being mechanical. Let it be a polygonal space, which we cut into triangles, and of which we then affirm that it _is_ those triangles. Here the experimentation (although usually done by a pencil in the hands) may be done by the unaided imagination.
We hold the space, first conceived as polygonal simply, in our mind's eye until our attention wandering to and fro within it has carved it into the triangles. The triangles are a new conception, the result of this new operation. Having once conceived them, however, and compared them with the old polygon which we originally conceived and which we have never ceased conceiving, we judge them to fit exactly into its area. The earlier and later conceptions, we say, are of one and the same space. But this relation between triangles and polygon which the mind cannot help finding if it compares them at all, is very badly expressed by saying that the old conception has developed into the new.
New conceptions come from new sensations, new movements, new emotions, new associations, new acts of attention, and new comparisons of old conceptions, and not in other ways. Endogenous prolification is not a mode of growth to which conceptions can lay claim.
I hope, therefore, that I shall not be accused of huddling mysteries out of sight, when I insist that the psychology of conception is not the place in which to treat of those of continuity and change.
Conceptions form the one class of entities that cannot under any circumstances change. They can cease to be, altogether; or they can stay, as what they severally are; but there is for them no middle way. They form an essentially discontinuous system, and translate the process of our perceptual experience, which is naturally a flux, into a set of stagnant and petrified terms. The very conception of flux itself is an absolutely changeless meaning in the mind: it signifies just that one thing, flux, immovably.--And, with this, the doctrine of the flux of the concept may be dismissed, and need not occupy our attention again.[391] 'ABSTRACT' IDEAS.
We have now to pass to a less excusable mistake. There are philosophers who deny that associated things can be broken asunder at all, even provisionally, by the conceiving mind. The opinion known as Nominalism says that we really never frame any conception of the partial elements of an experience, but are compelled, whenever we think it, to think it in its totality, just as it came.
I will be silent of mediæval Nominalism, and begin with Berkeley, who is supposed to have rediscovered the doctrine for himself. His asseverations against 'abstract ideas' are among the oftenest quoted passages in philosophic literature.
"It is agreed," he says, "on all hands that the qualities or modes of things do never really exist each of them apart by itself, and separated from all others, but are mixed, as it were, and blended together, several in the same object. But, we are told, the mind being able to consider each quality singly, or abstracted from those other qualities with which it is united, does by that means frame to itself abstract ideas...After this manner, it is said, we come by the abstract idea of man, or, if you please, humanity, or human nature; wherein it is true there is included color, because there is no man but has some color, but then it can be neither white, nor black, nor any particular color, because there is no one particular color wherein all men partake. So likewise there is included stature, but then it is neither tall stature nor low stature, nor yet middle stature, but something abstracted from all these. And so of the rest...Whether others have this wonderful faculty of abstracting their ideas, they best can tell: for myself, I find indeed I have a faculty of imagining or representing to myself the ideas of those particular things I have perceived and of variously compounding and dividing them...I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the body. But then, whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and color. Likewise the idea of man that I frame to myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described. And it is equally impossible for me to form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the body moving, and which is neither swift nor slow, curvilinear nor rectilinear; and the like may be said of all other abstract general ideas whatsoever...And there is ground to think most men will acknowledge themselves to be in my case. The generality of men which are simple and illiterate never pretend to abstract notions. It is said they are difficult, and not to be attained without pains and study.
"Now I would fain know at what time it is men are employed in surmounting that difficulty, and furnishing themselves with those necessary helps for discourse. It cannot be when they are grown up, for then it seems they are not conscious of any such painstaking; it remains therefore to be the business of their childhood. And surely the great and multiplied labor of framing abstract notions will be found a hard task for that tender age. Is it not a hard thing to imagine that a couple of children cannot prate together of their sugar-plums and rattles and the rest of their little trinkets, till they have first tacked together numberless inconsistencies, and so framed in their minds abstract general ideas, and annexed them to every common name they make use of?"[392] The note, so bravely struck by Berkeley, could not, however, be well sustained in face of the fact patent to every human being that we _can_ mean color without meaning any particular color, and stature without meaning any particular height. James Mill, to be sure, chimes in heroically in the chapter on Classification of his 'Analysis'; but in his son John the nominalistic voice has grown so weak that, although 'abstract ideas' are repudiated as a matter of traditional form, the opinions uttered are really nothing but a conceptualism ashamed to call itself by its own legitimate name.[393] Conceptualism says the mind can conceive any quality or relation it pleases, and mean nothing but it,