AN ABUSE OF ABSTRACTION 485 



ON A VEEY PEEVALENT ABUSE OF ABSTEACTION 



By Professor WILLIAM JAMES 



HARVARD UNIVERSITY 



ABSTEACT concepts, such as elasticity, voluminousness, discon- 

 nectedness, are salient aspects of our concrete experiences which 

 we find it useful to single out. Useful, because we are then reminded 

 of other things that offer those same aspects; and, if the aspects carry 

 consequences in those other things, we can return to our first things 

 expecting those same consequences to accrue. 



To be helped to anticipate consequences is always a gain, and, such 

 being the help that abstract concepts give us, it is obvious that their 

 use is fulfilled only when we get back again into concrete particulars 

 by their means, bearing the consequences in our minds, and enriching 

 our notion of the original objects therewithal. 



Without abstract concepts to handle our perceptual particulars by, 

 we are like men hopping on one foot. Using concepts along with 

 the particulars, we become bipedal. We throw our concept forward, 

 get a foothold on the consequence, hitch our line to this, and draw our 

 percept up, traveling thus with a hop, skip and jump over the surface 

 of life at a vastly rapider rate than if we merely waded through the 

 thiclmess of the particulars as accident rained them down upon our 

 heads. Animals have to do this, but men raise their heads higher 

 and breathe freely in the upper conceptual air. 



The enormous esteem professed by all philosophers for the con- 

 ceptual form of consciousness is easy to understand. From Plato's 

 time dowTiwards it has been held to be our sole avenue to essential 

 truth. Concepts are universal, changeless, pure; their relations are 

 eternal; they are spiritual, while the concrete particulars which they 

 enable us to handle are corrupted by the flesh. They are precious in 

 themselves, then, apart from their original use, and confer new dignity 

 upon our life. 



One can find no fault with this way of feeling about concepts so 

 long as their original function does not get swallowed up in the 

 admiration and lost. That function is of course to enlarge mentally 

 our momentary experiences by adding to them the consequences con- 

 ceived; but unfortunately that function is not only too often forgotten 

 by philosophers in their reasonings, but is often converted into its 

 exact opposite, and made a means of diminishing the original experi- 

 ence by denying (implicitly or explicitly) all its features save the one 

 specially abstracted to conceive it by. 



