CONCEPTION. 475 



actus puros and awe-inspiring principles and despise the 

 reverential mood, content tliemselves with sajdng that we 

 are mistaken in supposing we ever get sight of the face of 

 an universal ; and that what deludes us is nothing but the 

 swarm of * individual ideas ' which may at any time be 

 awakend by the hearing of a name. 



If we open the pages of either school, we find it impos- 

 sible to tell, in all the whirl about universal and particular, 

 when the author is talking about universals in the mind, 

 and when about objective universals, so strangely are the two 

 mixed together. James Ferrier, for example, is the most 

 brilliant of anti-nominalist writers. But who is nimble- 

 witted enough to count, in the following sentences from 

 him, the number of times he steps from the known to the 

 knower, and attributes to both whatever properties he finds 

 in either one ? 



"To think is to pass from the singular or particular to the idea 

 [concept] or universal. . . . Ideas are necessary because no thinking 

 can take place without them. They are universal, inasmuch as they 

 are completely divested of the particularity which characterizes all the 

 phenomena of mere sensation. To grasp the nature of this univer- 

 sality is not easy. Perhaps the best means by which this end may be 

 compassed is by contrasting it with the particular. It is not difficult 

 to understand that a sensation, a phenomenon of sense, is never more 

 than the particular which it is. As such, that is, in its strict particu- 

 larity, it is absolutely unthinkable. In the very act of being thought, 

 something more than it emerges, and this something more cannot be 

 again the particular. . . . Ten particulars pe?' se cannot be thought 

 of any more than one particular can be thought of ; . . . there always 

 emerges in thought an additional something, which is the possibility of 

 other particulars to an indefinite extent. . . . The indefinite additional 

 something which they are instances of is a universal. . . . The idea 

 or universal cannot possibly be pictured in the imagination, for this 

 would at once reduce it to the particular. . . . This inability to form 

 any Sort of picture or representation of an idea does not proceed 

 from any imperfection or limitation of our faculties, but is a quality 

 inherent in the very nature of intelligence. A contradiction is in- 

 volved in the supposition that an idea or a universal can become the 

 object either of sense or of the imagination. An idea is thus diamet 

 ricaily opposed to an image. " * 



The nominalists, on their side, admit a ywost-universal, 

 something which we think as if it tvere universal, though it 



* Lectures on Greek Philosophy, pp. 33-39. 



