CONCEPTION. 479 



sions, the question whetlier a single thing, or a whole class 

 of things, or only an unassigned quality, be meant by it, is 

 an insignificant matter of detail. Our meanings are of 

 singulars, particulars, indefinites, and universals, mixed 

 together in every way. A singular individual is as much 

 conceived when he is isolated and identified away from the 

 rest of the world in my mind, as is the most rarefied and 

 universally applicable quality he may possess — being, for 

 example, when treated in the same way.* From every 

 point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character 

 ascribed to universal conceptions is surj^rising. Why, from 

 Plato and Aristotle downwards, philosojDliers should have 

 vied with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the par- 

 ticular, and in adoration of that of the general, is hard to 

 understand, seeing that the more adorable knowledge ought 

 to be that of the more adorable things, and that the tfdngs 

 of worth are all concretes and singulars. The only value 

 of imiversal characters is that they help us, by reasoning, 



as much as articulate imaginings and propositions are; once restore, I say, 

 the vague to its psychological rights, and the matter presents no further 

 difficulty. 



" And then we see that the current opposition of Feeling to Knowledge 

 is quite a false issue. If every feeling is at the same time a bit of knowl- 

 edge, we ought no longer to talk of mental states difl'ering by having more 

 or less of the cognitive quality; they only differ in knowing more or less, 

 in having much fact or little fact for their object. The feeling of a broad 

 scheme of relations is a feeling that knows much ; the feeling of a simple 

 quality is a feeling that knows little. But the knowing itself, whether of 

 much or of little, has the same essence, and is as good knowing in the one 

 case as in the other. Concept and image, thus discriminated through 

 their objects, areconsubstantial in their inward nature, as modes of feeling. 

 The one, as particular, will no longer be held to be a relatively base sort of 

 entity, to be taken as a matter of course, whilst the other, as universal, 

 is celebrated as a sort of standing miracle, to be adored but not explained. 

 Both concept and image, qua subjective, are singular and particular. Both 

 are moments of the stream, which come and in an instant are no more. 

 The word universality has no meaning as applied to their psychic body or 

 structure, which is always finite. It only has a meaning when applied to 

 their use, import, or reference to the kind of object they may reveal. The 

 representation, as such, of the universal object is as particular as that of 

 an object about which we know so little that the interjection ' Ha !' is all 

 it can evoke from us in the way of speech. Both should be weighed in the 

 same scales, and have the same measure meted out to them, whether of 

 worship or of contempt. " (Mind, ix. pp. 18-19.) 



* Hodgson, Time and Space, p. 404. 



