44 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



monic equivalent as a conception, which, therefore, is 

 but another name for a general idea, thus generated by 

 an assemblage of particular ideas." * Here again the 

 word " generated " is an equivocal expression. What 

 follows, however, is clear and unequivocal. He says, 

 "Just as Mr. Galton's method of superimposing on the 

 same sensitive plate a number of individual images gives 

 rise to a blended photograph, wherein each of the indi- 

 vidual constituents is partially and proportionally repre- 

 sented ; so in the sensitive tablet of the memory, 

 numerous images of previous perceptions are fused 

 together into a single conception, which then stands as 

 a composite picture, or class-representation, of these its 

 constituent images." 



These superimposed images we have elsewhere care- 

 fully referred to,t and have distinguished such affections 



* p. 23. 



t See "On Truth," pp. 103, 191, 206. In addition to the 

 power we have through each sense-organ to apprehend its own 

 special object {e.g. colour through the eye, tone through the ear, etc.), 

 our consentience (and therefore that of animals also), is affected in 

 an analogous and to a certain degree similar manner, by the same 

 object felt through different sense-organs [e.g. a triangle as seen or 

 felt, or a fox as seen or smelt), owing to previous associations of 

 sensations, and which object thus comes to be apprehended by this 

 iniernal feeling. Similarly the several synchronous impressions 

 which have been received from different objects all of the same 

 kind, give rise to a corresponding, more or less vague or blurred, 

 internal impression (analogous to a Galton photograph). Such a 

 photograph, however, whatever may be the number of individuals 

 from which it is constructed, remains, after all, a strictly individual 

 thing — a single particular impression. It is the same with the image 

 of the imagination, which is only called '^sensuous universal" by 

 analogy, and which, of course, is not truly general or " universal " at 

 all. It is only a particular image, which, from the mode of its produc- 

 tion and the purposes it serves, has an analogy with true universals. 



