8 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. 



conceived by my mind. It is multiplied or repeated numerically 

 in each of them ; while as conceived in the abstract by my intel 

 lect it is one and common and communicable, or indefinitely 

 multipliable. 



Again, when I interpret the individual things of sense by 

 means of universal ideas the contents of which I attribute to those 

 things in such judgments as &quot;John is a man,&quot; or &quot;John is a living 

 being,&quot; or &quot;John is not a spirit,&quot; I do not imply that these uni 

 versal ideas are adequate representations of the individual things, 

 or exhaust all that can be known about the latter. I only claim 

 that they are faithful and give me true knowledge so far as they 

 go. They reveal to me the common generic and specific essences 

 of the realities revealed to my senses, but not the whole indi 

 vidual essence or nature of any one of them. I admit that they 

 are inadequate : that no number of abstract ideas about an in 

 dividual thing will give me a full and complete insight into its 

 reality. But this is an essential limitation of the human mind 

 itself. We are not omniscient. 



We have thus accounted for the origin of our universal ideas by assert 

 ing that they are all abstracted by the intellect from the individual data 

 revealed to consciousness by the operation of our senses. We regard as 

 erroneous the view that some or all of them are not thus derived from sense 

 data, but are in some form or other innate or inherent in the intellect, inde 

 pendently of, and anterior to, the operation of our senses. The question is 

 purely psychological. 



We have accounted also for the validity of our universal ideas in other 

 words, for the trustworthiness of the role they fulfil for us in interpreting the 

 realities revealed to us through our senses, and thus giving us an insight into 

 the nature of those realities by pointing out what we conceive to be the true 

 relation of the universal idea to the singular sense object. This relation we 

 have explained by saying that the object of the universal idea is really em 

 bodied in, and constitutes partially the nature, the very reality, of the indi 

 vidual sense object ; but that the feature of universality which characterizes 

 the object of the universal idea as apprehended by the intellect, does not 

 belong to that object as the latter exists in the individual things of the 

 world : that it is a modality added on to the object by the consideration of 

 the intellect itself. The intellect, therefore, rightly and truly attributes the 

 object of its universal idea to the individual thing, but not the universality 

 of that object ; for the universality is a mental mode added on by the intel 

 lect hence called in scholastic philosophy &quot; intentio universalitatis &quot;. 



5. THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL IDEAS : SOLUTIONS. The 

 account just given of the relation of our universal ideas to the 

 individual things about which we affirm or deny the former in 



