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 cognito 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 - 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. 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.
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 is is intended to apply.
We can give no more definite account of this vague conscious-
ness than has been given on pp.249-266.But that is no reason for denying its presence.
