CONCEPTION. 473 



be, isolated and abstracted from the total experience in 

 which they ajDpear, is the most indisputable function of our 

 thought. 



UNI VERS ALS. 



After abstractions, universals ! The ' fringe,' which 

 lets us believe in the one, lets vis believe in the other too. 

 An individual conception is of something restricted, in its 

 application, to a single case. A universal or general con- 

 cejjtion is of an entire class, or of something belonging to 

 an entire class, of things. The conception of an abstract 

 quality is, taken by itself, neither universal nor jjarticular.* 

 If I abstract ivliite from the rest of the wintry landscape 

 this morning, it is a perfectly definite conception, a self- 

 identical quality which I may mean again ; but, as I have 

 not yet individualized it by expressly meaning to restrict it 

 to this particular snow, nor thought at all of the possibility 

 of other things to which it may be applicable, it is so far 

 nothing but a 'that,' a 'floating adjective,' as Mr. Brad- 

 ley calls it, or a topic broken out from the rest of the 

 Avorld. Properly it is, in this state, a singular — I have 

 ' singled it out ;' and wdien, later, I universalize or indi- 

 vidualize its apj^lication, and my thought turns to mean 

 either this white or all possible whites, I am in reality mean- 

 ing two new things and forming two new conceptions.f 

 Such an alteration of m}^ meaning has nothing to do with 

 any change in the image I may have in my mental eye, but 

 solely with the vague consciousness that surrounds the 

 image, of the sphere to which it is intended to apply. We 

 can give no more definite account of this vague conscious- 



* The traditional conceptualist doctrine is that an abstract must eo ipso 

 be a universal. Even modern and independent authors like Prof. Dewey 

 (Psychology, 207) obey the tradition : "The mind seizes upon some one 

 aspect, . . . abstracts or prescinds it. This very seizure of some one 

 element generalizes the one abstracted. . . . Attention, in drawing it 

 forth, makes it a distinct content of consciousness, and thus universalizes 

 it; it is considered no longer in its particular connection with the object, 

 but on its own account; that is, as an idea, or what it signifies to the 

 mind; and signiticance is always universal." 



fC. F. Reid's Intellectual Powers, Essay v. chap, in.— Whitened is 

 one thing, the whiteness of this sheet of paper another thing. 



