FALLACIES OF SIMPLE INSPECTION. 363 



does, in the tendency to presume an exact correspond- 

 ence 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 remarkable manifestation 

 consists in the personification of abstractions. Man- 

 kind in all ages have had a strong propensity to con- 

 clude 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, Na- 

 ture, 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 phe- 

 nomena; whiteness and a white thing are only different 

 phrases, required by convenience for speaking, under 

 different circumstances, of the same external fact. 

 Not such, however, was the notion which this verbal 

 distinction suggested of old,, either to the vulgar or to 

 philosophers. 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 in- 

 definite numbers of individual substances, but names 

 of a peculiar kind of entities termed Universal Sub- 

 stances. Because we can think and speak of man in 

 general, that is, of all men in so far as possessing the 

 common attributes of the species, without fastening our 

 thoughts permanently on some one individual man; 

 therefore man in general was supposed to be, not an 

 aggregate of individual men, but an abstract or uni- 

 versal man, distinct from these. 



