LOGIC OF CONCEPTS, 75 



concerned, the man makes no call upon his higher faculties of 

 ideation. But, in virtue of this act of cognition, whereby he 

 assigns a name to an idea known as such, he has created 

 for himself— and for purposes other than locomotion— a 

 priceless possession : he has formed a concept. 



Nevertheless, the concept which he has formed is an 

 extremely simple one — amounting, in fact, to nothing more 

 than the naming of one among the most habitual of his 

 recepts. But it is of the nature of concepts that, when once 

 formed, they admit of being intentionally compared ; and thus 

 there arises a new possibility in the way of grouping ideas — 

 namely, no longer by means of sensuous associations, but by 

 means of symbolic representations. The names of recepts 

 now serve as symbols of the recepts themselves, and so admit 

 of being grouped without reference to the sensuous per- 

 ceptions out of which they originally sprang. No longer 

 restricted to time, place, circumstance, or occasion, ideas may 

 now be called up and manipulated at pleasure ; for in this 

 new method of ideation the mind has, as it were, acquired an 

 algebra of recepts : it is no longer necessary that the actual 

 recepts themselves should be present to sensuous perception, 

 or even to representative imagination. And as concepts are 

 thus symbols of recepts, they admit, as I have said, of being 

 compared and combined without reference to the recepts 

 which they serve to symbolize. Thus we become able, as it 

 were, to calculate in concepts in a way and to an extent that 

 would be quite impossible in the merely perceptual medium 

 of recepts. Now, it is in this algebra of the imagination that 

 all the higher work of ideation is accomplished ; and as the 

 result of long and elaborate syntheses of concepts we turn out 

 mental products of enormous intricacy — which, nevertheless, 

 may be embodied in single words. Such words, for example, 

 as Virtue, Government, Mechanical Equivalent, stand for 

 immensely more elaborated concepts than the words Solid 

 or Fluid— seeing that to the former there are no possible 

 equivalents in the way of recepts. 



Hence I say we must begin by recognizing the great reach 



