Example: I recall the physical sensations of a chill, and live it over
in my mind, so that I can accurately describe how a chill feels to me,
though I can but surmise how one feels to you.
_Inorganic memory_ is the mind's reproduction of its own reactions in
the past.
Example: Myself having a chill, how I acted; what I thought and my
emotions during that chill.
_Ideation_ is the mind's grouping of percepts by the aid of memory, to
form concepts.
Example: I perceive color, form, mouth, eyes, nose, chin, etc. These
percepts I combine as a result of past experience (memory) to form my
concept, _face_; and the process of combining is ideation.
_Concepts_ are mental representations of things or qualities,
_i. e._, of object or quality percepts.
We might say that the percept is the mind's immediate image of a thing
or quality, and the concept is the result of the storing up and grouping
and recombining of percepts. Thus a lasting mental picture is secured;
and my idea of horse, for instance, is so clear and definite a thing in
my mind that if I should never again see a particular horse, I should
yet always be able to think accurately of a horse.
Concepts are of two kinds--concrete and abstract.
A _concrete concept_, or concrete idea (for concept and idea are
interchangeably used), is an idea of a particular object or quality.
Examples: This wine-sap apple (object concept).
This sweet orange (quality concept).
An _abstract concept_, or abstract idea, is a mental reproduction of a
quality or an object dissociated from any particular setting or
particular experience.
Abstract ideas are of two kinds. We speak of them as _abstract object
concepts_ and as _abstract quality concepts_. An _abstract object
concept_ we might call a generalized idea, an idea comprehending all
objects having certain things in common.
Example: My idea of animal includes many scores of very different
individual animals, but they all have bodies and heads and extremities.
They all have some kind of digestive apparatus; they breathe, and can
move.
An _abstract quality concept_ is easier to think than to explain. It is
as though the mind in considering a multitude of different objects found
a certain quality common to many of them, and it "abstracted," _i. e._,
drew this particular quality, and only this, from them all, and then
imagined it as a something in itself which it calls _redness_, or
_whiteness_, or _goodness_. Thereafter, whenever it finds something like
it anywhere else again it says, "That is like my redness." So I call it
"red." In other words, consciousness thereafter can determine in a newly
discovered object something it knows well merely because that something
corresponds to a representation which experience and memory have already
formed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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