CONCEPTION. 477 



the fact to be conceived be the indefinitely numerous ac- 

 tual and possible members of a class, then it is assumed 

 that if we can only get enough ideas to huddle together for 

 a moment in the mind, the being of each several one of 

 them there will be an equivalent for the knoiuing, or mean- 

 ing, of one member of the class in question ; and their num- 

 ber will be so large as to confuse our tally and leave it 

 doubtful whether all the possible members of the class 

 have thus been satisfactorily told off or not. 



Of course this is nonsense. An idea neither is what it 

 knows, nor knows what it is ; nor will swarms of copies of 

 the same ' idea,' recurring in stereotyped form, or ' by the 

 irresistible laws of association formed into one idea,' ever 

 be the same thing as a thought of ' all the possible members ' < 

 of a class. We must mean tJiat by an altogether special 

 bit of consciousness ad hoc. But it is easy to translate 

 Berkeley's, Hume's, and Mill's notion of a swarm of ideas 

 into cerebral terms, and so to make them stand for some- 

 thing real ; and, in this sense, I think the doctrine of these 

 authors less hollow than the opposite one which makes 

 the vehicle of universal conceptions to be an actus purus of 

 the soul. If each ' idea ' stand for some special nascent 

 nerve-process, then the aggregate of these nascent processes 

 might have for its conscious correlate a psychic ' fringe,' 

 which should be just that universal meaning, or intention 

 that the name or mental picture employed should mean all 

 the possible individuals of the class. Every peculiar compli- 

 cation of brain-processes must have some peculiar correlate 

 in the soul. To one set of processes will correspond the 

 thought of an indefinite taking of the extent of a word like 

 man ; to another set that of a particular taking ; and to a 

 third set that of a universal taking, of the extent of the 

 same word. The thought corresponding to either set of 

 processes, is always itself a unique and singular event, 

 whose dependence on its peculiar nerve-process I of course 

 am far from professing to explain.* 



* It may add to the effect of the. text to quote a passage from the essay 

 in 'Mind,' referred to on p. 324. 



" Why may we not side with the conceptuallsts in saying that the uni- 

 versal scn.se of a word does correspond to a mental fact of some kind, but 



