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).
Lectures on Greek Philosophy, pp.33-39.
Analysis, chap.VIII.
Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§ 11, 12.
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 absolutely set forth .
"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.
