28 ULTIMATE RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 



ject of which something is predicated be Englishmen, the 

 answering state of consciousness is a still more inadequate 

 representative of the reality. Yet more remote is the like- 

 ness of the thought to the thing, if reference be made to 

 Europeans or to human beings. And when we come to 

 propositions concerning the mammalia, or concerning the 

 whole of the vertebrata, or concerning animals in general, 

 or concerning all organic beings, the unlikeness of our con- 

 ceptions to the objects named reaches its extreme. Through- 

 out which series of instances we see, that as the number of 

 objects grouped together in thought increases, the concept, 

 formed of a few typical samples joined with the notion of 

 multiplicity, becomes more and more a mere symbol; not 

 only because it gradually ceases to represent the size of the 

 group, but also because as the group grows more hetero- 

 geneous, the typical samples thought of are less like the 

 average objects which the group contains. 



This formation of symbolic conceptions, which inevita- 

 bly arises as we pass from small and concrete objects to large 

 and to discrete ones, is mostly a very useful, and indeed ne- 

 cessary, process. When, instead of things whose attributes 

 can be tolerably well united in a single state of conscious- 

 ness, we have to deal with things whose attributes are too 

 vast or numerous to be so united, we must either drop in 

 thought part of their attributes, or else not think of them at 

 all — either form a more or less symbolic conception, or no 

 conception. We must predicate nothing of objects too great 

 or too multitudinous to be mentally represented ; or we must 

 make our predications by the help of extremely inadequate 

 representations of such objects — mere symbols of them. 



But while by this process alone we are enabled to form 

 general propositions, and so to reach general conclusions, we 

 are by this process perpetually led into danger, and very 

 often into error. We habitually mistake our symbolic con- 

 ceptions for real ones; and so are betrayed into countless 

 false inferences. Xot only is it that in proportion as the 



