The Monist, Vol. 3, 1892-1893 : $b A quarterly magazineVarious
Philosophy
The Monist, Vol. 3, 1892-1893 : $b A quarterly magazine
Various
Philosophy -- Periodicals
But objects are individual and generally found with various points of
distinction some of which are irrelevant to most of the turns of mental
life. We therefore neglect the irrelevant points and take many objects
as copies of one another. This process is _not_ the formation of the
concept or notion but it suggests and prompts that formation. We cannot
but regard it as an error to take a conception as a _sum_ of individuals.
It seems to us to be rather in the nature of a _locus_. A curve contains
an infinity of points and yet the curve is not any sum of points even
though it is often allowable to speak of it as the sum of all its points.
So any concept, say, man, is not all the men that now live nor yet all
the men that eternity both backwards and forwards has contained and will
contain. A concept is a manifold and strictly universal and infinite
in respect to the particulars it subsumes. We speak of the infinitive
mood of a verb because the meaning of the word as thus taken is not put
under any modification. In like manner the meaning of any concept though
subject to various limitations in its applications is as a concept merely
to be regarded as obtaining in a purely infinitive sense. Professor
Jevons found a difficulty in classifying what he called _material_
terms, such as stone, sand, water, etc. Other logicians have put such
terms as singular terms, while still others have classed them as general
terms. There is a great variety of such terms. Potatoes, wheat, butter,
ice, cattle, water, hydrogen, the names of all the elements, ether,
electricity, time, space, love, virtue, etc., are instances. It seems to
us that such terms are the normal types of general terms and that the
canonical forms of our universal propositions ought to be unquantified
not only as regards the predicates but also as regards the subjects. Why
not “man is animal” just as “lard is grease” or “man is mortal” just as
“butter is cheap”?
Moreover the distinction between a general concept and one that is called
singular is only one of degree and not of kind. Every so-called singular
term is potentially at least only an individual instance under a possible
general or universal concept. A striking example of this potentiality is
furnished by the modern generalisations of that formerly singular term,
space. If these observations are well founded, the universals of thought
even though arising out of the facts of experience and rigidly beholden
to experience for every last element out of which they are constructed,
form nevertheless a Formal-Thought-World, and the mind of man in virtue
of its powers of imaginative construction and generalisation has a
constitution that enables it to subsume the actual objective universe as
only one particular of a universality of a higher rank.
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