in isolation from everything else in the world. This is, of course, the doctrine which we have professed. John Mill says: "The formation of a Concept does not consist in separating the attributes which are said to compose it from all other attributes of the same object, and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoined from any others. We neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cognize them in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in combination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual object. But, though meaning them only as part of a larger agglomeration, we have the power of fixing our attention on them, to the neglect of the other attributes with which we think them combined.
_While the concentration of attention lasts, if it is sufficiently intense, we may be temporarily unconscious of any of the other attributes, and may really, for a brief interval, have nothing-present to our mind but the attributes constituent of the concept_...General concepts, therefore, we have, properly speaking, none; we have only complex ideas of objects in the concrete: but we are able to _attend exclusively to certain parts_ of the concrete idea: and by that _exclusive attention_ we enable those parts to _determine exclusively the course of our thoughts_ as subsequently called up by association; and are in a condition to carry on a train of meditation or reasoning relating to those parts only, _exactly as if_ we were able to _conceive_ them separately from the rest."[394] This is a lovely example of Mill's way of holding piously to his general statements, but conceding in detail all that their adversaries ask. If there be a better description extant, of a mind in possession of an 'abstract idea,' than is contained in the words I have italicized, I am unacquainted with it. The Berkeleyan nominalism thus breaks down.
* * * * * It is easy to lay bare the false assumption which underlies the whole discussion of the question as hitherto carried on. That assumption is that ideas, in order to know, must be cast in the exact likeness of whatever things they know, and that the only things that can be known are those which ideas can resemble. The error has not been confined to nominalists. _Omnis cognitio fit per assimilationem cognoscentis et cogniti_ has been the maxim, more or less explicitly assumed, of writers of every school. Practically it amounts to saying that an idea must _be_ a duplicate edition of what it knows[395]--in other words, that it can only know itself--or, more shortly still, that knowledge in any strict sense of the word, as a self-transcendent function, is impossible.
Now our own blunt statements about the ultimateness of the cognitive relation, and the difference between the 'object' of the thought and its mere 'topic' or 'subject of discourse' (cf. pp. 275 ff.), are all at variance with any such theory; and we shall find more and more occasion, as we advance in this book, to deny its general truth. All that a state of mind need do, in order to take cognizance of a reality, intend it, or be 'about' it, is to lead to a remoter state of mind which either acts upon the reality or resembles it. The only class of thoughts which can with any show of plausibility be said to resemble their objects are sensations. The stuff of which all our other thoughts are composed is symbolic, and a thought attests its pertinency to a topic by simply _terminating_, sooner or later, in a sensation which resembles the latter.
But Mill and the rest believe that a thought must _be_ what it means, and mean what it _is_, and that if it be a picture of an entire individual, it cannot mean any part of him to the exclusion of the rest. I say nothing here of the preposterously false descriptive psychology involved in the statement that the only things we can mentally picture are individuals completely determinate in all regards. Chapter XVIII will have something to say on that point, and we can ignore it here. For even if it were true that our images were always of concrete individuals, it would not in the least follow that our meanings were of the same.
_The sense of our meaning is an entirely peculiar element of the thought._ It is one of those evanescent and 'transitive' facts of mind which introspection cannot turn round upon, and isolate and hold up for examination, as an entomologist passes round an insect on a pin.
In the (somewhat clumsy) terminology I have used, it pertains to the 'fringe' of the subjective state, and is a 'feeling of tendency,' whose neural counterpart is undoubtedly a lot of dawning and dying processes too faint and complex to be traced. The geometer, with his one definite figure before him, knows perfectly that his thoughts apply to countless other figures as well, and that although he _sees_ lines of a certain special bigness, direction, color, etc., he _means_ not one of these details. When I use the word _man_ in two different sentences, I may have both times exactly the same sound upon my lips and the same picture in my mental eye, but I may mean, and at the very moment of uttering the word and imagining the picture, know that I mean, two entirely different things. Thus when I say: "What a wonderful man Jones is!" I am perfectly aware that I mean by man to exclude Napoleon Bonaparte or Smith. But when I say: "What a wonderful thing Man is!"
I am equally well aware that I mean to _in_clude not only Jones, but Napoleon and Smith as well. This added consciousness is an absolutely positive sort of feeling, transforming what would otherwise be mere noise or vision into something _understood_; and determining the sequel of my thinking, the later words and images, in a perfectly definite way. We saw in Chapter IX that the image _per se_, the nucleus, is _functionally_ the least important part of the thought. _Our doctrine, therefore, of the 'fringe' leads to a perfectly satisfactory decision of the nominalistic and conceptualistic controversy,_ so far as it touches psychology. _We must decide in favor of the conceptualists,_ and affirm that the power to think things, qualities, relations, or whatever other elements there may 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.[396] If I abstract _white_ from the rest of the wintry landscape this morning, it is a perfectly definite conception, a self-identical 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.[397] 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 consciousness than has been given on pp. 249-266. But that is no reason for denying its presence.[398] 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 awe-inspiring, 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 _actus purus_ 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."[399] The nominalists, on their side, admit a _quasi_-universal, something which we think _as if it were_ universal, though it 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:[400] "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:[401] "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 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.[402] Truly in comparison with the fact that every conception, whatever it be of, is one of the mind's immutable possessions, the question whether a single thing, or a whole class of things, or only an unassigned quality, be meant by it, is an insignificant matter of detail. Our meanings are of singulars, particulars, indefinites, and universals, mixed together in every way. A singular individual is as much _conceived_ when he is isolated and identified away from the rest of the world in my mind, as is the most rarefied and universally applicable quality he may possess--_being_, for example, when treated in the same way.[403] From every point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising.
Why, from Plato and Aristotle downwards, philosophers should have vied with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the particular, and in adoration of that of the general, is hard to understand, seeing that the more adorable knowledge ought to be that of the more adorable things, and that the _things_ of worth are all concretes and singulars.
The only value of universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning, to know new truths about individual things. The restriction of one's meaning, moreover, to an individual thing, probably requires even more complicated brain-processes than its extension to all the instances of a kind; and the mere mystery, as such, of the knowledge, is equally great, whether generals or singulars be the things known. In sum, therefore, the traditional universal-worship can only be called a bit of perverse sentimentalism, a philosophic 'idol of the cave.'
* * * * * It may seem hardly necessary to add (what follows as a matter of course from pp. 229-237, and what has been implied in our assertions all along) that _nothing can be conceived twice over without being conceived in entirely different states of mind_. Thus, my arm-chair is one of the things of which I have a conception; I knew it yesterday and recognized it when I looked at it. But if I think of it to-day as the same arm-chair which I looked at yesterday, it is obvious that the very conception of it as the same is an additional complication to the thought, whose inward constitution must alter in consequence.
In short, it is logically impossible that the same thing should be _known as the same_ by two successive copies of the same thought. As a matter of fact, the thoughts by which we know that we mean the same thing are apt to be very different indeed from each other. We think the thing now in one context, now in another; now in a definite image, now in a symbol. Sometimes our sense of its identity pertains to the mere fringe, sometimes it involves the nucleus, of our thought. We never can break the thought asunder and tell just which one of its bits is the part that lets us know which subject is referred to; but nevertheless we always _do_ know which of all possible subjects we have in mind. Introspective psychology must here throw up the sponge; the fluctuations of subjective life are too exquisite to be arrested by its coarse means. It must confine itself to bearing witness to the fact that all sorts of different subjective states do form the vehicle by which the same is known; and it must contradict the opposite view.
The ordinary Psychology of 'ideas' constantly talks as if the vehicle of the same thing-known must be the same recurrent state of mind, and as if the having over again of the same 'idea' were not only a necessary but a sufficient condition for meaning the same thing twice.
But this recurrence of the same idea would utterly defeat the existence of a repeated knowledge of anything. It would be a simple reversion into a pre-existent state, with nothing gained in the interval, and with complete unconsciousness of the state having existed before. Such is not the way in which we think. As a rule we are fully aware that we have thought before of the thing we think of now. The continuity and permanency of the topic is of the essence of our intellection.
We recognize the old problem, and the old solutions; and we go on to alter and improve and substitute one predicate for another without ever letting the subject change.
This is what is meant when it is said that thinking consists in making _judgments_. A succession of judgments may all be about the same thing.
The general practical postulate which encourages us to keep thinking at all is that by going on to do so we shall judge better _of the same things_ than if we do not.[404] In the successive judgments, all sorts of new operations are performed on the things, and all sorts of new results brought out, without the sense of the main topic ever getting lost. At the outset, we merely _have_ the topic; then we _operate_ on it; and finally we have it again in a richer and truer way. A compound conception has been substituted for the simple one, but with full consciousness that both are of the Same.
The distinction between having and operating is as natural in the mental as in the material world. As our hands may hold a bit of wood and a knife, and yet do naught with either; so our mind may simply be aware of a thing's existence, and yet neither attend to it nor discriminate it, neither locate nor count nor compare nor like nor dislike nor deduce it, nor recognize it articulately as having been met with before. At the same time we know that, instead of staring at it in this entranced and senseless way, we may rally our activity in a moment, and locate, class, compare, count, and judge it. There is nothing involved in all this which we did not postulate at the very outset of our introspective work: realities, namely, _extra mentem_, thoughts, and possible relations of cognition between the two. The result of the thoughts' operating on the data given to sense is to transform the order in which experience _comes_ into an entirely different order, that of the _conceived_ world. There is no spot of light, for example, which I pick out and proceed to define as a pebble, which is not thereby torn from its mere time- and space-neighbors, and thought in conjunction with things physically parted from it by the width of nature. Compare the form in which facts appear in a text-book of physics, as logically subordinated laws, with that in which we naturally make their acquaintance. The conceptual scheme is a sort of sieve in which we try to gather up the world's contents.
Most facts and relations fall through its meshes, being either too subtle or insignificant to be fixed in any conception. But whenever a physical reality is caught and identified as the same with something already conceived, it remains on the sieve, and all the predicates and relations of the conception with which it is identified become its predicates and relations too; it is subjected to the sieve's network, in other words. Thus comes to pass what Mr. Hodgson calls the translation of the perceptual into the conceptual order of the world.[405] In Chapter XXII we shall see how this translation always takes place for the sake of some subjective _interest_, and how the conception with which we handle a bit of sensible experience is really nothing but a teleological instrument. _This whole function of conceiving, of fixing, and holding fast to meanings, has no significance apart from the fact that the conceiver is a creature with partial purposes and private ends._ There remains, therefore, much more to be said about conception, but for the present this will suffice.
FOOTNOTES: [386] There are two other 'principles of identity' in philosophy.
The _ontological_ one asserts that every real thing is what it is, that _a_ is _a_, and _b, b_. The _logical_ one says that what is once true of the subject of a judgment is always true of that subject.
The ontological law is a tautological truism; the logical principle is already more, for it implies subjects unalterable by time. The _psychological_ law also implies facts which might not be realized: there might be no succession of thoughts; or if there were, the later ones might not think of the earlier; or if they did, they might not recall the content thereof; or, recalling the content, they might not take it as 'the same' with anything else.
[387] In later chapters we shall see that determinate relations exist between the various data thus fixed upon by the mind. These are called _a priori_ or axiomatic relations. Simple inspection of the data enables us to perceive them; and one inspection is as effective as a million for engendering in us the conviction that between _those_ data that relation must always hold. To change the relation we should have to make the data different. 'The guarantee for the uniformity and adequacy' of the data can only be the mind's own power to fix upon any objective content, and to mean that content as often as it likes. This right of the mind to 'construct' permanent ideal objects for itself out of the data of experience seems, singularly enough, to be a stumbling-block to many. Professor Robertson in his clear and instructive article 'Axioms' in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th edition) suggests that it may only be where _movements_ enter into the constitution of the ideal object (as they do in geometrical figures) that we can "_make_ the ultimate relations to be what for us they must be in all circumstances." He makes, it is true, a concession in favor of conceptions of number abstracted from "subjective occurrences succeeding each other in time" because these also are acts "of construction, dependent on the power we have of voluntarily determining the flow of subjective consciousness." "The content of passive sensation," on the other hand, "may indefinitely vary beyond any control of ours." What if it do vary, so long as we can continue to think of and mean the qualities it varied from? We can 'make' ideal objects for ourselves out of irrecoverable bits of passive experience quite as perfectly as out of easily repeatable active experiences. And when we have got our objects together and compared them, we do not _make_, but _find_, their relations.
[388] Cf. Hodgson, Time and Space, § 46. Lotze, Logic, § 11.
[389] "For though a man in a fever should from sugar have a bitter taste which at another time would produce a sweet one, yet the idea of bitter in that man's mind would be as distinct as if he had tasted only gall." (Locke's Essay bk. ii, chap. xi, § 3. Read the whole section!)
[390] Black round things, square white things, _per contra_, Nature gives us freely enough. But the combinations which she refuses to realize may exist as distinctly, in the shape of postulates, as those which she gives may exist in the shape of positive images, in our mind. As a matter of fact, she _may_ realize a warm cold thing whenever two points of the skin, so near together as not to be locally distinguished, are touched, the one with a warm, the other with a cold, piece of metal. The warmth and the cold are then often felt as if in the same objective place. Under similar conditions two objects, one sharp and the other blunt, may feel like one sharp blunt thing. The same space may appear of two colors if, by optical artifice, one of the colors is made to appear as if seen _through_ the other.--Whether any two attributes whatever shall be compatible or not, in the sense of appearing or not to occupy the same place and moment, depends simply on _de facto_ peculiarities of natural bodies and of our sense-organs.
_Logically_, anyone combination of qualities is to the full as _conceivable_ as any other, and has as distinct a meaning for thought.
What necessitates this remark is the confusion deliberately kept up by certain authors (e.g. Spencer, Psychology, §§ 420-7) between the inconceivable and the not-distinctly-imaginable. How do we know _which_ things we cannot imagine unless by first conceiving them, meaning _them_ and not other things?
[391] Arguments seldom make converts in matters philosophical; and some readers, I know, who find that they conceive a certain matter differently from what they did, will still prefer saying they have two different editions of the same conception, one evolved from the other, to saying they have two different conceptions of the same thing. It depends, after all, on how we define conception. We ourselves defined it as the function by which a state of mind means to think the same whereof it thought on a former occasion. Two states of mind will accordingly be two editions of the same conception just so far as either does mean to think what the other thought; but no farther. If either mean to think what the other did not think, it is a different conception from the other. And if either mean to think all that the other thought, _and more_, it is a different conception, so far as the _more_ goes. In this last case one state of mind has two conceptual functions. Each thought decides, by its own authority, which, out of all the conceptive functions open to it, it shall now renew; with which other thought it shall identify itself as a conceiver, and just how far. "The same A which I once meant," it says, "I shall now mean again, and mean it with C as its predicate (or what not) instead of B, as before." In all this, therefore, there is absolutely no changing, but only uncoupling and recoupling of conceptions. Compound conceptions come, as functions of new states of mind. Some of these functions are the same with previous ones, some not. Any changed opinion, then, _partly_ contains new editions (absolutely identical with the old, however) of former conceptions, _partly_ absolutely new conceptions.
The division is a perfectly easy one to make in each particular case.
[392] Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§ 10, 14.
[393] 'Conceptualisme honteux,' Rabier, Psychologie, 310.
[394] Exam. of Hamilton, p. 393. Cf. also Logic, bk. ii, chap. v, § 1, and bk iv, chap ii, § 1.
[395] E.g.: "The knowledge of things must mean that the mind finds itself in them, or that, in some way, the difference between them and the mind is dissolved." (E. Caird, Philosophy of Kant, first edition, p. 553.)
[396] 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."
iii.--_Whiteness_ is one thing, _the whiteness of this sheet of paper_ another thing.
[398] 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, 1882).
[399] Lectures on Greek Philosophy, pp. 33-39.
[400] Analysis, chap. viii.
[401] Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§ 11, 12.
[402] 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 at the same time, agreeing with the nominalists that all mental facts are modifications of subjective sensibility, why may we not call that fact a 'feeling'? _Man_ meant for _mankind_ is in short a different feeling from _man_ as a mere noise, or from _man_ meant for _that_ man, to wit, John Smith alone. Not that the difference consists simply in the fact that, when taken universally, the word has one of Mr. Galton's 'blended' images of man associated with it.
Many persons have seemed to think that these blended or, as Prof.
Huxley calls them, 'generic' images are equivalent to concepts. But, in itself, a blurred thing is just as particular as a sharp thing; and the generic character of either sharp image or blurred image depends on its being felt _with its representative function_. This function is the mysterious _plus_, the understood meaning. But it is nothing applied to the image from above, no pure act of reason inhabiting a supersensible and semi-supernatural plane. It can be diagrammatized as continuous with all the other segments of the subjective stream. It is just that staining, fringe, or halo of obscurely felt relation to masses of other imagery about to come, but not yet distinctly in focus, which we have so abundantly set forth [in Chapter IX].
"If the image come unfringed, it reveals but a simple quality, thing, or event; if it come fringed, it may reveal something expressly taken universally or in a scheme of relations. The difference between thought and feeling thus reduces itself, in the last subjective analysis, to the presence or absence of 'fringe.' And this in turn reduces itself, with much probability, in the last physiological analysis, to the absence or presence of sub-excitements in other convolutions of the brain than those whose discharges underlie the more definite nucleus, the substantive ingredient, of the thought,--in this instance, the word or image it may happen to arouse.
"The contrast is not, then, as the Platonists would have it, between certain subjective facts called images and sensations, and others called acts of relating intelligence; the former being blind perishing