468 PSYCHOLOGY. 



tliey severally are ; but there is for them no middle way. 

 They form an essentially discontinuous system, and trans- 

 late the process of our perceptual experience, which is nat- 

 urally a llux, into a set of stagnant and petrified terms. The 

 very conception of flux itself is an absolutely changeless 

 meaning in the mind : it signifies just that one thing, flux, 

 immovably. — And, with this, the doctrine of the flux of the 

 concept may be dismissed, and need not occupy our atten- 

 tion again.* 



•ABSTKACT' IDEAS. 



We have now to pass to a less excusable mistake. 

 There are philosophers who deu}^ that associated things 

 can be broken asunder at all, even provisionally, by the 

 conceiving mind. The opinion known as Nominalism says 

 that we really never frame any conception of the partial 

 elements of an experience, but are compelled, whenever we 

 think it, to think it in its totality, just as it came. 



I will be silent of mediaeval Nominalism, and begin with 

 Berkeley, who is supposed to have rediscovered the doc- 



* Arguments seldom make converts in matters philosophical; and some 

 readers, I know, who find that they conceive a certain matter differently 

 from what they did, will still prefer saying they have two different editions 

 of the same conception, one evolved from the other, to saying they have 

 two different conceptions of the same thing. It depends, after all, on how 

 we define conception. We ourselves defined it as the function by which 

 a state of mind means to think the same whereof it thought on a former 

 occasion. Two states of mind will accordingly be two editions of the same 

 conception just so far as either does mean to think what the other thought; 

 but no farther. If either mean to think what tiie other did not think, it 

 is a different conception from the other. And if either mean to think all 

 that the other thought, and moi-e, it is a different conception, so far as the 

 moi-e goes. In this la.st case one state of mind has two conceptual func- 

 tions. Each thought decides, by its own authority, which, out of all the con- 

 ceptive functions open to it, it shall now renew; with which other thought 

 it shall identify itself as a conceiver, and just how far. "The same 

 A which I once meant," it says, " I .shall now mean again, and mean it 

 with C as its predicate (or what not) instead of B, as before." In all this, 

 therefore, there is absolutely no changing, but only uncoupling and re- 

 coupling of conceptions. Compound conceptions come, as functions of 

 new states of mind. Some of these functions are the same with previous 

 ones, some not. Any changed opinion, then, parili/ contains new editions 

 (absolutely identical with the old, however) of former conceptions, partlp 

 absolutely new conceptions. The division is a perfectly easy one to make 

 in each particular case. 



