Equally important is the overcoming of the narrowness of consciousness by abstraction and generalization. When I am thinking of trees, the contents of my mind are very few. There may be a word image, a visual image of something tall and branching; hardly more. All the special features of trees of all kinds are absent from consciousness. So I can easily think of additional things, for instance of the age which trees may reach, or the elevation at which trees cease to grow. But the moment I begin by accident to think of a thing which does not harmonize with those features of the tree which thus far have been absent from consciousness, immediately those features become conscious and inhibit the contradictory thoughts. They have been unconscious and yet we cannot say that they have been sheer nothing. The consciousness of the general idea has in some way prepared the path for the special features from which it has been abstracted. They have been carried close to the door of consciousness, so to speak, and the slightest impulse coming from an associated idea will cause them to enter. This is our meaning when we say that within the general idea of which we are conscious all those special features are included. They are included by representation, the general idea being the deputy taking care of their interests. Thus our mind is freed from the necessity of carrying at any moment a heavy load of actual states of consciousness and is nevertheless able to act as reasonably as if those mental states were present. In using representative ideas, our mind has actually at its service the enormous number of all those individual ideas which are represented by them. QUESTIONS 134. Enumerate in what different respects ideation is (more or less) similar to perception. 135. Why are reproduced experiences fragmentary? 136. How does a general idea originate? 137. What is the difference between abstractions and general ideas? 138. Can an idea be both an abstraction and a general idea? 139. Illustrate the formation of a natural law by means of abstraction and generalization. 140. With what feature of political life may the service of a general idea in mental life be compared? § 16. LANGUAGE 1. _Word Imagery_ There can be no doubt that animals are to some extent able to generalize. A dog or a cat is trained to distinguish between indoors and outdoors and to adjust its behavior accordingly. This would be impossible if the dog possessed no general notion of room or street.