Humanistic Studies of the University of Kansas, Vol. 1Mitchell, Arthur
Philosophy
Humanistic Studies of the University of Kansas, Vol. 1
Mitchell, Arthur
Humanities
Since, then, a symbol never has (just by reason of its function as
symbol) the same structure as the object symbolized, there is nothing
either in the immobility, or the publicity, or the universality, or
the discreteness of any concept, or in its inclusion of all these
characters, to prevent its validly meaning the fluid and private and
particular and continuous. And the real must necessarily have the
conceptual characters, since the characters correlative to them, alone
regarded by Bergson as characters of reality, have no meaning _except
correlatively_ to the conceptual characters. Thus “fluidity of nothing”
is a phrase without meaning. The something which is fluid, requires,
in order that _fluidity_ as such shall be a datum of experience, a
coefficient aspect of immobility. It is not fluidity that flows. The
immobile, snap-shot conceptual form--not only does this _belong_ to the
cataract, as the possibility of photographing it proves, but this very
form is indispensable to the fact of flow in its genuine concreteness.
As for uniqueness, a fact so unique that it is like nothing else in
any respect, could not be discriminated. The bare discernibleness
of a datum requires a basis of discrimination which is common to it
and to that from which it is discriminated. Continuity is analogous
with unity, and has no meaning if there is no aspect, in it, of
composition, and so of discreteness, as unity is nothing if not union
of a plurality. That the real has the aspects eulogistically favored
by intuitionism is beyond question. That it has not the complementary
conceptual aspects is demonstrably false, and is an illusion of
“exclusive particularity,” explainable only by that prepossession with
a certain abstract view, whose psychological origin has been repeatedly
noted in this study.
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