MODIFICATIONS IN THE IDEA OF GOD, ETC. 45" 



showed not only that the same writer used them in con- 

 tradictory scDses, but that different writers seem to have 

 used them as meaning pretty much what they pleased, so 

 now I must ask those who talk about abstract ideas to 

 explain what they mean by them. "Abstract" means "that 

 which takes or is taken away." Now what idea can you form of 

 anything if you have first stripped it of everything wliich 

 has any correspondence with the world of fact? An idea 

 of anything which has been carefully deprived of all 

 corresj^ondence with the reality is either an idea coutrarv 

 to the fact or it is no idea at alL The concrete must 

 come in somewhere, in order to discriminate one thinkable- 

 thing from another. Otherwise we have entered a world 

 where " naught is everything, and everything is^ 

 naught." It is all very well to talk, as metaphysicians do, 

 very freely, of the '•^ Ding an sicli" But what is the 

 " Ding an sich " ? How can we conceive of anything, 

 unless through its relation to or contrast with other 

 existing things or facts? There is nothing whatever 

 of which existence can be predicated which is not 

 intimately connected with all kinds of other things in the 

 universal Cosmos. How, then, can you conceive of it 

 accurately if you persist in tearing it from its necessary 

 environment ? I am inclined, therefore, to think that abstract 

 ideas, not when regarded as convenient formulaa of general- 

 ization, in which capacity they are not merely useful, but 

 absolutely necessary, but when regarded as metaj)hysical 

 terms clissociatetl from the results of observation, and sup- 

 posed from that very dissociation to become sound foundations 

 on wliich to build conclusions, have been very " fatal " indeed' 

 to the progress of thought. I am inclined more and more 

 to regard experience as the true foundation of all knowledge, 

 except that of the Divine Being — an exception to which I 

 shall presently return — and to regard the progress of oui- 

 knowledge as due, not to abstract speculation, but solely to . 

 additions to our stores of experience and to our successive 

 generalizations from them. That man has a capacity for 

 drawing conclusions from experience, and that these con- 

 clusions form the ideas on which he acts there can be no doubt. 

 But it is a capacity for receiving impressions from facts, not a 

 capacity for forming ideas apart from facts.* The more I 



* This does not amount to a declaration that our characters and habits- 

 of thought are simply the result of circumstances. Character may be- 



