abstract notions corresponding to the abstract terms employed in speaking or writing; but they have not been hitherto successful in their attempts to show what an abstract notion is. On closely analysing what passes in my own mind, I do not discover that I can think of anything but particular objects and events, either apart or combined, single or numerous, with various degrees of distinctness and completeness. In this personal experience I am happy to find myself supported by Berkeley, from whom I so often differ, in a passage in which, it is to be observed, he speaks indiscriminately of common names and abstract terms.

"Whether others," says he, "have this wonderful faculty of abstracting their ideas they best can tell; for myself I find indeed I have a faculty of imagining or representing to myself the ideas of those particular things I have perceived, and of variously compounding and dividing them. I can imagine a man with two heads, or the upper parts of a man joined to the body of a horse. I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the body. But then, whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and colour. Likewise the idea of man that I frame to myself, must be either of a white or a black or a tawny, a straight or a crooked, a tall or a low or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described. And it is

equally impossible for me to form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the body moving, and which is neither swift nor slow, curvilinear nor rectilinear; and the like may be said of all other abstract general ideas whatsoever. To be plain, I own myself able to abstract in one sense, as when I consider some particular parts and qualities separated from others with which, though they are united in some object, yet it is possible they may really exist without them. But I deny that I can abstract one from another, or conceive separately those qualities which it is impossible should exist so separated; or that I can frame a general notion by abstracting from particulars in the manner aforesaid."*

What has been here said of general and abstract terms applies in substance to words of a complex and collective character, such as government, society, civilisation, the age, the church, the army. These are often very abbreviated expressions of many different objects and events; some of them having so wide a meaning that a chapter might be required to draw it out in detail.

They, nevertheless, resemble such general and abstract terms as I have considered in the circumstance which I have had particularly in view: whatever images or ideas they raise up, however numerous or complicated they may be, are separable

*Of the Principles of Human Knowledge. Introduction, sect. 10.

into individual parts or elements corresponding to objects formerly perceived; and consist of nothing else than the representations of such objects, single, or in groups, or in sequences. Like general and abstract language, these terms raise up only representative ideas; and, like them, they often raise up such as are very obscure, vacillating, and indistinct. All these terms, it may be added, or perhaps more properly their significations, are apt to be personified, like the faculties or operations of the mind, and to be treated in speculation as if they were substantive and independent agents. Hence arises, as in the other case, the invention of multitudes of fictitious incidents and operations, which conceal ignorance and satisfy mankind with the semblance of knowledge. This is a subject, however, which, to have justice done to it, would require a treatise to itself.

* Wt the end

further thought. I would ask what ideas are called up by such

words as sink, mind, God,

names

for inferred entities. We have the wonde & the Jebenommence which the words unit,, but on the entities howe, and can have, no Smeetssion.

Course has nothing to do with the back to it I h

Life, Trail, te.

or individual image. See jonge 250 on the woods

LETTER XXIV.

ABSTRACT TERMS, CONTINUED.

I HAVE to thank you most cordially for your comments on my two last Letters, and will here quote one passage from them for the sake of the explanation which it has suggested to me.

"Well," says the passage in question, "granting you have proved that abstract terms call up nothing but particular images or representations, this applies only to the power of language. May there not be ideas which rise up in the mind independently of words? Language is an after matter. The objects or events designated by our terms must exist before the terms are applied to them, and the real question is, 'are not such abstract ideas engendered before words can have anything to do with the process ?""

To this I reply, in the first place, that of such ideas I, for my own part, am not conscious; being so constituted as to think of nothing but particular objects and events, or, in other words, to have none but particular ideas, either single, or in groups, or sequences; and, in the second place, that since the

abstract ideas, the existence of which is maintained have been specifically endowed with names, it is of no consequence whether the question is stated in connection with language or not. It may be put in either of two forms: "Are there such things as abstract ideas recalled to the mind by abstract terms?" or, "Are there such things as abstract ideas originally engendered in the mind, and subsequently matched with separate and peculiar appellations?" In either case an answer in the affirmative asserts the actual existence of a mental phenomenon, called an abstract idea, of a nonrepresentative character; and it is this alleged mental phenomenon of which with Berkeley I profess myself to be wholly unconscious. No theorist, as far as I am aware (I speak doubtingly on account of the strange metaphysical speculations which at one time or other have appeared), ever supposed that the abstract ideas which he alleges to exist were originally begotten by the terms employed to denote them; he must admit that they were first engendered and then named.

The subject as stated in the first question I have already examined; let us consider it again as stated in the second. Fortunately for my purpose, I find that to this second question several eminent philosophers have in the most express terms returned an affirmative answer. Mr. Dugald Stewart may be selected as having given as lucid an exposition of that opinion as any other writer.