486 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



This itself is a highly abstract way of stating my complaint, and 

 it needs to be redeemed from obscurity by showing instances of what is 

 meant. Certain particular beliefs dear to my heart have been con- 

 ceived in this viciously abstract way by critics. One is the " will to 

 believe," so-called; another is the indeterminism of certain futures; 

 a third is the notion that truth may vary with the standpoint of the 

 man who holds it. I believe that the perverse abuse of the abstracting 

 function has often led critics to employ false arguments against these 

 doctrines, and has led their readers too to false conclusions. I should 

 like to try to save the situation, if possible, by a few counter-critical 

 remarks. 



Let me give the name of " vicious abstractionism " to a way of using 

 concepts which may be thus described: We conceive a concrete situa- 

 tion by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and class- 

 ing it under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters 

 all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may 

 bring, we proceed to use our concept privatively; we reduce the origi- 

 nally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name ab- 

 stractly taken, treating it as a case of " nothing but " that concept, and 

 acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is 

 abstracted were expunged.^ Abstraction, functioning in this way, 

 becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance in 

 thought. It mutilates things; it creates difficulties and finds impossi- 

 bilities; and more than half the trouble that metaphysicians and 

 logicians give themselves over the paradoxes and dialectic puzzles of 

 the universe may, I am convinced, be traced to this relatively simple 

 source. The viciously 'privative em/ployment of abstract characters 

 and class-names is, I am persuaded, the original sin of the meta- 

 physical mind. 



To proceed immediately to concrete examples, cast a glance at the 

 belief in " free will," demolished with such specious persuasiveness 

 in this magazine not long ago by the skilful hand of Professor Fuller- 

 ton.^ Wlien a common man says that his will is free, what does he 

 mean? He means that there are situations of bifurcation inside of 

 his life in which two futures seem to him equally possible, for both 

 have their roots equally planted in his present and his past. Either, 

 if realized, will grow out of his previous motives, character and 

 circumstances, and will continue uninterruptedly the pulsations of 

 his personal life. But sometimes both at once are incompatible with 

 physical nature, and then it seems to the naive observer as if he made 

 a choice between them now, and that the question of which future is to 



^ Let not the reader confound the fallacy here described with legitimately 

 negative inferences such as those drawn in the mood " Celarent " of the logic- 

 books. 



*PopuLAE Science Monthly, Vols. 58 and 59. 



