FALLACIES OF SIMPLE INSPECTION. 321 



4. We pass to another d priori fallacy or natural pre- 

 judice, allied to the former, and originating as that does, in 

 the tendency to presume an exact correspondence between the 

 laws of the mind and those of things external to it. The 

 fallacy may be enunciated in this general form Whatever 

 can be thought of apart exists apart: and its most re- 

 markable manifestation consists in the personification of 

 abstractions. Mankind in all ages have had a strong propen- 

 sity to conclude that wherever there is a name, there must be 

 a distinguishable separate entity corresponding to the name ; 

 and every complex idea which the mind has formed for itself 

 by 'operating upon its conceptions of individual things, was 

 considered to have an outward objective reality answering to 

 it. Fate, Chance, Nature, Time, Space, were real beings, nay, 

 even gods. If the analysis of qualities in the earlier part of 

 this work be correct, names of qualities and names of sub- 

 stances stand for the very same sets of facts or phenomena; 

 whiteness and a white thing are only different phrases, required 

 by convenience for speaking of the same external fact under 

 different relations. Not such, however, was the notion which 

 this verbal distinction suggested of old, either to the vulgar 

 or to the scientific. Whiteness was an entity, inhering or 

 sticking in the white substance : and so of all other qualities. 

 So far was this carried, that even concrete general terms were 

 supposed to be, not names of indefinite numbers of individual 

 substances, but names of a peculiar kind of entities termed 

 Universal Substances. Because we can think and speak of 

 man in general, that is, of all persons in so far as possessing 

 the common attributes of the species, without fastening our 

 thoughts permanently on some one individual person ; there- 

 fore man in general was supposed to be, not an aggregate of 

 individual persons, but an abstract or universal man, distinct 

 from these. 



It may be imagined what havoc metaphysicians trained 

 in these habits made with philosophy, when they came to the 

 largest generalizations of all. Substantice Secundce of any kind 

 were bad enough, but such SubstantiaB Secund as TO ov, for 

 example, and ro cv, standing for peculiar entities supposed to 



VOL. II. 21 



