I will be silent of mediæval Nominalism, and begin with Berkeley, who is supposed to have rediscovered the doc- trine 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?"
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. Conceptualism says the mind can conceive any quality or relation it pleases, and mean nothing but it, 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 out 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."
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.
