58 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. 



that process. The reason of the designation is that when the mind 

 forms the concept expressed by the abstract term, it holds its 

 object, i.e. the attribute or group of attributes it is considering, 

 apart from the individual thing or things which were revealed to it 

 in sensation, and in which it found those attributes in the first 

 instance ; whereas when it expresses its concept by means of a 

 concrete term generous, human, man it is considering the attri 

 butes which make up the intension of that concept, not apart from, 

 but as embodied in, the existing individual things revealed to it 

 either directly or indirectly by sense experience. From this it 

 follows that all adjectives are concrete ; for they are not the names 

 of attributes considered apart from things (yellowness)^ but rather of 

 attributes as existing in things (&quot; gold \syellow, i.e. a yellow thing &quot;). 

 By protracted analysis of our ideas of things &quot; we may obtain 

 higher and higher abstractions, each of which may be considered, 

 by comparison with those from which it was derived, as being 

 abstract ; and, in turn, when compared with those derived from it 

 may be considered concrete. Party spirit might be reckoned an 

 abstract quality of a political party ; which is itself by no means 

 so concrete an entity as one of the persons composing that party. 

 The virulence of that party spirit may again be reckoned as an 

 attribute derived from the spirit itself, and so on. The fact is that 

 hardly any object, as objects are regarded by us, can be selected, 

 which is not to some extent a product of our powers of abstrac 

 tion, and the more or less of this faculty called into play in any 

 particular case hardly warrants us in labelling the instances re 

 spectively with such distinct designations.&quot; x In fact so far as our 

 concepts are concerned, these are all abstract in the sense that they 

 are formed by repeated efforts of abstraction : even the concepts 

 which we express by individual significant names, or which we 

 associate with proper names (28), are groups or syntheses of 

 abstract attributes, and are therefore potentially universal, though 

 actually restricted to a single individual. 2 But we may certainly 

 think of all such attributes either apart, in themselves, or as exist 

 ing in, and forming or constituting, some individual existing being 

 or thing ; 3 and we may have different terms to indicate the same 



1 VENN, o/&amp;gt;. cit. t p. 190 (italics ours). 



See VENN, of&amp;gt;, cit., pp. 163, 167, 175, for the sense in which intellectual con 

 cepts can be said to be singular. 



3 i.e. the ovvia irpwrr) of Aristotle, the Substantia Prima of the Scholastics the 

 individual, or first underlying subject of all real attributes and of all logical predi 

 cates. 



