32 



MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



day four or five more or less distinct recollections, which 

 obliterated themselves, leave behind in us a simple, colourless, 

 vague representation, into which enter as components various 

 reviving sensations, in an utterly feeble, incomplete, and 

 abortive state. But this representation is not the general or 

 abstract idea. It is but its accompaniment, and, if I may say 

 so, the one from which it is extracted. For the representation, 

 though badly sketched, is a sketch, the sensible sketch of a 

 distinct individual ; in fact, if I make it persist and dwell 

 upon it, it repeats some special visual sensation ; I see mentally 

 some outline which corresponds only to some particular 

 araucaria, and, therefore, cannot correspond to the whole class : 

 now, my abstract idea corresponds to the whole class ; it differs, 

 then, from the representation of an individual. Moreover, my 

 abstract idea is perfectly clear and determinate ; now that I 

 possess it, I never fail to recognize an araucaria among the 

 various plants I may be shown ; it differs, then, from the con- 

 fused and floating representation I have of some particular 

 araucaria. What is there, then, within me so clear and 

 determinate, corresponding to the abstract character, corre- 

 sponding to all araucarias, and corresponding to it alone ? A 

 class-name, the name araucaria. . . . Thus we conceive the 

 abstract characters of things by means of abstract names 

 which are our abstract ideas, and the formation of our abstract 

 ideas is nothing more than the formation of names." * 



The real issue, then, is as to what we are to understand 

 by this term abstraction, or its equivalents. If we are to 

 limit the term to the faculty of "taking in and retaining 

 together several combinations of simple ideas," plus the 

 faculty of giving a name to the resulting compound, then 



* Loc. cit., pp. 397-399. Allusion may also be here conveniently made to an 

 interesting and suggestive work by another French writer, M. Binet {La Psycho- 

 logie du Raisonnementy 18S6). His object is to show that all processes of reason- 

 ing are fundamentally identical with those of perception. In order to do this he 

 gives a detailed exposition of the general fact that processes of both kinds depend 

 on " fusions " of states of consciousness. In the case of perception the elements 

 thus fused are sensations, while in the case of reasoning they are perceptions — in 

 both cases the principle of association being alike concerned. 



