470 P8YVH0L0OT. 



The note, so bravely struck by Berkeley, could not, 

 however, be well sustained in face of the fact })atent to 

 every human being that we can mean color without mean- 

 ing any particular color, and stature without meaning any 

 particular height. James Mill, to be sure, chimes in heroi- 

 cally in the chapter on Classitication of his 'Analysis'; but 

 in his son John the nominalistic voice has grown so weak 

 that, although ' abstract ideas ' are repudiated as a matter 

 of traditional form, the opinions uttered are really nothing 

 but a conceptualism ashamed to call itself by its own legit- 

 imate name.* Conceptualism says the mind can conceive 

 any quality or relation it pleases, and mean nothing but it, 

 in isolation from everything else in the world. This is, of 

 course, the doctrine which we have professed. John Mill 

 says : 



" The formation of a Concept does not consist in separating the at- 

 tributes which are said to compose it from all other attributes of the 

 same object, and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoined 

 from any others. AVe neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cog- 

 nize them in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in com- 

 bination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual ob- 

 ject. But, though meaning them only as part of a larger agglomera- 

 tion, we have the power of fixing our attention on them, to the neglect 

 of the other attributes with which we think them combined. WfdU 

 the concentration of attention lasts, if it is sufficiently intense, we may 

 be temporarily unconscious of any of the other attributes, and may 

 really, for a brief interval, have notJdng 'present to our mind hid the 

 attributes eonstituent of the concept. . . . General concepts, therefore, 

 we have, properly speaking, none ; we have only complex ideas of ob- 

 jects in the concrete : but we are able to attend exclusively to certain 

 parts of the concrete idea : and by that exclusive attention we enable 

 those parts to deterinine exclusively the course of our thoughts as 

 subsequently called up by association ; and are in a condition to carry 

 on a tram of meditation or reasoning relating to those parts only, ex- 

 actly as if we were able to conceive them separately from the rest." f 



This is a lovely example of Mill's way of holding piously 

 to his general statements, but conceding in detail all that 

 their adversaries ask. If there be a better descrijjtion ex- 

 tant, of a mind in possession of an ' abstract idea,' than is 



* ' Conceptualisnie honteux,' Rabier, Psycbologie, 310. 

 f Exam, of Hjunilton, p. 393. Cf. also Logic, bk. ii. chap. v. § 1, and 

 bk= IV. chap. II. § 1. 



