THE MIND AND KNO WLEDGE. 7 



in which they appear abstract, universal, indeterminate, and com 

 mon or communicable, i.e. realizable equally in an indefinite 

 multitude of individuals. In other words, our senses and our 

 intellect attain to the \ same realities but in different ways. While 

 our senses apprehend material things in the condition in which 

 these really exist, i.e. as concrete, individual, separate from one 

 another, changeable and changing in time and space, our intellect 

 grasps a portion greater or less of the nature of these things, 

 the portion common to larger or smaller groups of them, the com 

 mon or class essences, the generic and specific essences of these things, 

 and it conceives this common portion in the abstract, i.e. in a static, 

 unchanging condition, apart from the influences to which it is sub 

 mitted in the state in which it is actually found in individual ma 

 terial things. Thus, while my senses perceive, or my imagination 

 pictures, the individual John, my intellect conceives, as embodied 

 in that individual, the various portions of his essence which make 

 him belong to various classes of things, e.g. that he is a corporeal 

 being, living, sentient, rational. 



When, therefore, I interpret any individual object of sense 

 experience by attributing to it the object of some universal idea 

 when, for example, I say &quot;John is a man &quot; I mean to assert 

 that the object of my universal idea, the entity, essence or nature 

 represented by it (e.g. human nature] is embodied in, and con 

 stitutes (partially, at least), the individual sense object (John). I 

 do not mean to assert that the object of my universal idea exists 

 in the individual sense object in the same way in which the 

 former is apprehended by my mind. If I did, my statement that 

 &quot;John is a man &quot; would be false and so would all statements as 

 serting universal attributes about individual things. For every 

 object conceived by the intellect through a universal idea (e.g. man) 

 is conceived apart from individualizing conditions, as abstract, and 

 hence as universal, i.e. common or communicable to, and realiz 

 able in, an indefinite multitude of individuals ; whereas that same 

 object, as it exists in the individual (e.g. John], is concrete and 

 individualized and incommunicable to others, and cannot be 

 attributed to others John is himself only ; nobody else is John : 

 but while John is a man, so is James also a man : man can be 

 attributed to both and to an indefinite multitude. And it can be 

 attributed to them truly, for each assertion means only that the 

 object of my universal idea human nature is really in each and 

 every one of the individuals, though not in the same way as it is 



