_ESSAYS NOT CERTAINLY HAZLITT’S, AND FRAGMENTS_ Character of Mr. Wordsworth’s New Poem The Excursion 572 The Duke D’Enghien 577 Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ 580 Sketches of the History of the Good Old Times 582 Historical Illustrations of Shakespeare 601 Mr. Crabbe 603 [Illustration: FACSIMILE (REDUCED) OF HAZLITT’s HANDWRITING, FROM A MS. IN THE POSSESSION OF MR. W. C. HAZLITT.] FUGITIVE WRITINGS ON ABSTRACT IDEAS I shall in this essay state Mr. Locke’s account of generalization, abstraction, and reasoning, as contrasted with the modern one, and then endeavour to defend the existence of these faculties, or acts of the mind from the objections urged against them by Hume, Berkeley, Condillac, and others, which are in truth merely repetitions of what Hobbes has said on the subject. I must premise, however, that I do not think it possible ever to arrive at a demonstration of generals or abstractions by beginning in Mr. Locke’s method with particular ones: this faculty of abstraction is by most considered as a sort of artificial refinement upon our other ideas, as an excrescence, no ways contained in the common impressions of things, nor scarcely necessary to the common purposes of life, and it is by Mr. Locke altogether denied to be among the faculties of brutes. It is the ornament and top-addition of the mind of man, which proceeding from simple sensations upwards, is gradually sublimed into the abstract notions of things; ‘from the root springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves more airy, last the bright consummate flower.’ On the other hand, I conceive that all our notions from first to last, are strictly speaking, general and abstract, not absolute and particular; and that to have a perfectly distinct idea of any one individual thing, or concrete existence, either as to the parts of which it is composed, or the differences belonging to it, or the circumstances connected with it, would imply an unlimited power of comprehension in the human mind, which is impossible. All particular things consist of, and lead to an infinite number of other things. Abstraction is a consequence of the limitation of the comprehensive faculty, and mixes itself more or less with every act of the mind of whatever kind, and in every moment of its existence. There is no idea of an individual object, which consists of a single impression, but of a number of impressions massed together: there is no idea of a particular quality of an object, which is perfectly simple, or which is not the result of a number of impressions of the same sort classed together by the mind without attending to their particular differences.