"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.
Truly in comparison with the fact that every conception, whatever it be of, is one of the mind's immutable posses-
sions, 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. 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.
