Universal Terms. 19 



and constimiing the objects of our tboughts: and they farther believed, 

 that some of these real existences corresponded to general terms. 

 Hence this sect were called Realists. When, in later limes, it was 

 shown that the supposition of ideas or existences in the mind, distinct 

 from the mind itself, was gratuitous and unfounded, the doctrine of 

 the Realists concerning the nature of universals, was of course over- 

 turned. But still-, as the mental eye turns inward, it sees a splendid 

 imagery, the transcripts of things beheld by the bodily organ of sight. 

 It is now the common belief that these are not in the mind, but that 

 they are mind itself — mysterious mind ! from its very nature in per- 

 petual action, and forever shifting the intellectual scene. But call 

 these pictures by what name we will, and be they in the mind or of 

 the mind, still they are there. The home of my childhood, the 

 flowers that I tended, the venerable forms of my father and mother, 

 I see them at this instant ; and thus things that I have perceived, 

 become wrought into the very texture of my mind. My intellectual 

 eye sees them not always, but words have power to call them forth, 

 although I am, before their utterance, unconscious of their existence. 

 But have that class of words called universals, a power to call up 

 tnental pictures, or have they not? This is still the question, al- 

 though we have introduced the new term conceptions as the techni- 

 cal word to express these internal and mental transcripts, of external 

 and material things. Here then our later philosophers take their 

 point of divergency. Mr. Stewart maintains that we have no con- 

 ceptions or ideas, (for the word is retained though the signification is 

 changed,) corresponding to general terms ; that the object of our 

 thoughts, when we speculate or reason concerning them, is not ideas 

 but words ; consequently we can neither speculate nor reason con- 

 cerning universals but by means of words. 



After Mr. Stewart had thus, as he supposed, settled this question, 

 having treated it at great length. Dr. Brown came before the public, 

 in his celebrated lectures, and with the air of a man who marches to 

 certain victory, attempted to establish the doctrine of general con- 

 ceptions, formerly maintained by Locke, Reid, and others. He 

 states the theory of the Nominalists, in the formation of universals, 

 to include merely the perception of the objects, and the invention of 

 a name by which to designate them as a class. He adds, to this 

 process of two steps, a third, which he supposes nature places be- 

 tween them — as thus. In the formation of classes, we first, says he, 

 perceive the objects ; secondly, have a feeling of their resemblance ; 



