in the Encyclopedia Britannica (9th edition) suggests that it may only be where movements enter into the constitution of the ideal object (as they do in geometrical figures) that we can " make the ultimate relations to be what for us they must be in all circumstances." He makes, it is true, a concession in favor of conceptions of number abstracted from "subjective occurrences succeeding each other in time" because these also are acts "of construction, dependent on the power we have of voluntarily determining the flow of subjective consciousness." "The content of passive sensation," on the other hand, "may indefinitely vary beyond any control of ours." What if it do vary, so long as we can continue to think of and mean the qualities it varied from? We can 'make' ideal objects for ourselves out of irrecoverable bits of passive experience quite as perfectly as out of easily repeatable active experiences.And when we have got our objects together and compared them, we do not make , but find , their relations.
Cf.Hodgson, Time and Space, § 46.Lotze, Logic, § 11.
"For though a man in a fever should from sugar have a bitter taste, which at another time would produce a sweet one, yet the idea of bitter in that man's mind would be as distinct as if he had tasted only gall." (Locke's Essay, bk.II.chap.XI.§ 3.Read the whole section!)
Black round things, square white things, per contra , Nature gives us freely enough.But the combinations which she refuses to realize may exist as distinctly, in the shape of postulates, as those which she gives may exist in the shape of positive images, in our mind.As a matter of fact, she may realize a warm cold thing whenever two points of the skin, so near together as not to be locally distinguished, are touched, the one with a warm, the other with a cold, piece of metal.The warmth and the cold are then often felt as if in the same objective place.Under similar conditions two objects, one sharp and the other blunt, may feel like one sharp blunt thing.The same space may appear of two colors if, by optical artifice, one of the colors is made to appear as if seen through the other - Whether any two attributes whatever shall be compatible or not, in the sense of appearing or not to occupy the same place and moment, depends simply on de facto peculiarities of natural bodies of our sense-organs.Logically , any one combination of qualities is to the full as conceivable as any other, and has as distinct a meaning for thought.What necessitates this remark is the confusion deliberately kept up by certain authors (e.g., Spencer, Psychology, §§ 426-7) between the inconceivable and the not-distinctly-imaginable.
How do we know which things we cannot imagine unless by first conceiving them, meaning them and not other things?
Arguments seldom make converts in matters philosophical;
and some readers, I know, who find that they conceive a certain matter differently from what they did, will still prefer saying they have two different editions of the same conception, one evolved from the other, to saying they have two different conceptions of the same thing.It depends, after all, on how we define conception.We ourselves defined it as the function by which a state of mind means to think the same whereof it thought on a former occasion.Two states of mind will accordingly be two editions of the same conception just so far as either does mean to think what the other thought; but no farther.If either mean to think what the other did not think, it is a different conception from the other.And if either mean to think all that the other thought, and more , it is a different conception, so far as the more goes.In this last case one state of mind has two conceptual functions.Each thought decides, by its own authority, which, out of all the conceptive functions open to it, it shall now renew; with which other thought it shall identify itself as a conceiver, and just how far."The same A which I once meant," it says, "I shall now mean again, and mean it with C as its predicate (or what not) instead of B, as before." In all this, therefore, there is absolutely no changing, but only uncoupling and re-coupling of conceptions.Compound conceptions come, as functions of new states of mind.Some of these functions are the same with previous ones, some not.Any changed opinion, then, partly contains new editions (absolutely identical with the old, however) of former conceptions, partly absolutely new conceptions.The division is a perfectly easy one to make in each particular case.
Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§
10, 14.
'Conceptualisme honteux,' Rabier, Psychologie, 310.
Exam.of Hamilton, p.393.Cf.also Logic, bk.
II.chap.v § 1.and bk.IV.chap.II.§ 1.
E.g.: "The knowledge of things must mean that the mind finds itself in them, or that, in some way, the difference between them and the mind is dissolved." (E.Caird, Philosophy of Kant, first edition, p.553.)
The traditional conceptualist doctrine is that an abstract must eo ipso be a universal.Even modern and independent authors like Prof.Dewey (Psychology, 207) obey the tradition: "The mind seizes upon some one aspect,...abstracts or prescinds it.This very seizure of some one element generalizes the one abstracted....Attention, in drawing it forth, makes it a distinct content of consciousness and thus universalizes it; it is considered no longer in its particular connection with the object, but on its own account; that is, as an idea, or what it signifies to the mind; and significance is always universal."
C.F.Reid's Intellectual Powers, Essay v.chap.
III.- Whiteness is one thing, the whiteness of this sheet of paper another thing.
