THE MIND AND KNOWLEDGE. 11 



about them, this knowledge would, in the conceptualist view, be fictitious : it 

 would not be a knowledge of real things at all but only of intellectual notions. 

 People generally believe, and rightly, that the various sciences give us genuine 

 knowledge about real things ; but science is made up of truths that hold good 

 universally, i.e. of truths about universal natures, such as the truth that 

 &quot;Water boils at 100 C. at the sea-level &quot; ; and if these universal natures are 

 only concepts of the mind the sciences can give us no information about 

 things but only about our own mental notions and the language in which these 

 are expressed. 



6. SOME MODERN SPECULATIONS ON UNIVERSAL IDEAS. Moderate 

 Realism takes this as self-evident : that whatever really exists is really an 

 individual thing, definite and determined, itself and no other ; that it is not 

 common to others and cannot be attributed to others ; a that it is only by being 

 intellectually conceived in the abstract, by becoming an object of intellectual 

 thought, that a thing is stripped of its individuality, loses its incommunic- 

 ability and becomes attributable to many &quot; praedicabile de multis, univer- 

 sale in praedicando &quot;. 



Plato, however, contended that it is not the individual at all that is real, but 

 only the universal ; and some modern philosophers, believing that the universal 

 (as such) has as good a claim to be considered real as the individual (as such), 

 and seeing that the universal as such is essentially conceptual, ideal, mental, 

 have concluded that the individual and the universal, or, in other words, the 

 real (of sense) and the ideal (of intellect) are the same. This is the doctrine 

 of the German philosopher, Hegel (1770-1831), a sort of idealistic monism 

 which breaks down all distinction between thought and thing. A similar 

 theory has the support, in England, of Green, Bosanquet, and Bradley, among 

 others. These writers confound the conceptual identity of the universal 

 nature, based on similarity of really distinct individuals, with real identity. 

 When I say, &quot;John is a man,&quot; and then, &quot;James is a man,&quot; the nature which 

 I assert to be embodied in, and really identical with, John, I apprehend to be 

 really and numerically distinct from, though similar to, the nature I assert to 

 be embodied in, and identical with, James. The two really distinct natures 

 are so similar, as embodied in the two individuals, that I can represent these 

 natures by one and the same concept and describe them by the same name, 

 human. This conceptual identity the writers referred to seem to confound 

 with real identity. Were the nature I attributed to John really identical with 

 that I attributed to James, I should be entitled to conclude that John and 

 James are really identical a sufficient reductio ad absurdum of this latest 

 speculation on the significance of the Universal. 



MERCIER Logique (Louvain, 1905), c. i. On the Universal; JOYCE, 

 Principles of Logic (Longmans, 1908), pp. 132-36. MERCIER, Criteriologie 

 Generate (Louvain, 1906), pp. 337 sqq. DE WULF, History of Medieval 

 Philosophy (Longmans, 1909), pp. 149 sqq., 321 sqq., 421 sqq. MAKER, 

 Psychology (6th edit.), pp. 294 sqq. JOSEPH, Logic, pp. 20 sqq., 49 sqq., 

 55 sqq. 



f TO. tta.6 fKaffra KOT &\\&amp;lt;av, a\\ erepo KO.T fKfii/wv. Non singularia de aliis 

 sed alia de ipsis praedicantur. ARISTOTLE, Anal. Pr., i., 27. 



