Chapter XXII

we shall see how this translation always takes place for the sake of some subjective _interest_, and how the conception with which we handle a bit of sensible experience is really nothing but a teleological instrument. _This whole function of conceiving, of fixing, and holding fast to meanings, has no significance apart from the fact that the conceiver is a creature with

## partial purposes and private ends._ There remains, therefore, much more

to be said about conception, but for the present this will suffice.

FOOTNOTES:

[386] There are two other 'principles of identity' in philosophy. The _ontological_ one asserts that every real thing is what it is, that _a_ is _a_, and _b, b_. The _logical_ one says that what is once true of the subject of a judgment is always true of that subject. The ontological law is a tautological truism; the logical principle is already more, for it implies subjects unalterable by time. The _psychological_ law also implies facts which might not be realized: there might be no succession of thoughts; or if there were, the later ones might not think of the earlier; or if they did, they might not recall the content thereof; or, recalling the content, they might not take it as 'the same' with anything else.

[387] In later chapters we shall see that determinate relations exist between the various data thus fixed upon by the mind. These are called _a priori_ or axiomatic relations. Simple inspection of the data enables us to perceive them; and one inspection is as effective as a million for engendering in us the conviction that between _those_ data that relation must always hold. To change the relation we should have to make the data different. 'The guarantee for the uniformity and adequacy' of the data can only be the mind's own power to fix upon any objective content, and to mean that content as often as it likes. This right of the mind to 'construct' permanent ideal objects for itself out of the data of experience seems, singularly enough, to be a stumbling-block to many. Professor Robertson in his clear and instructive article 'Axioms' in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th edition) suggests that it may only be where _movements_ enter into the constitution of the ideal object (as they do in geometrical figures) that we can "_make_ the ultimate relations to be what for us they must be in all circumstances." He makes, it is true, a concession in favor of conceptions of number abstracted from "subjective occurrences succeeding each other in time" because these also are acts "of construction, dependent on the power we have of voluntarily determining the flow of subjective consciousness." "The content of passive sensation," on the other hand, "may indefinitely vary beyond any control of ours." What if it do vary, so long as we can continue to think of and mean the qualities it varied from? We can 'make' ideal objects for ourselves out of irrecoverable bits of passive experience quite as perfectly as out of easily repeatable active experiences. And when we have got our objects together and compared them, we do not _make_, but _find_, their relations.

[388] Cf. Hodgson, Time and Space, § 46. Lotze, Logic, § 11.

[389] "For though a man in a fever should from sugar have a bitter taste which at another time would produce a sweet one, yet the idea of bitter in that man's mind would be as distinct as if he had tasted only gall." (Locke's Essay bk. ii, chap. xi, § 3. Read the whole section!)

[390] Black round things, square white things, _per contra_, Nature gives us freely enough. But the combinations which she refuses to realize may exist as distinctly, in the shape of postulates, as those which she gives may exist in the shape of positive images, in our mind. As a matter of fact, she _may_ realize a warm cold thing whenever two points of the skin, so near together as not to be locally distinguished, are touched, the one with a warm, the other with a cold, piece of metal. The warmth and the cold are then often felt as if in the same objective place. Under similar conditions two objects, one sharp and the other blunt, may feel like one sharp blunt thing. The same space may appear of two colors if, by optical artifice, one of the colors is made to appear as if seen _through_ the other.--Whether any two attributes whatever shall be compatible or not, in the sense of appearing or not to occupy the same place and moment, depends simply on _de facto_ peculiarities of natural bodies and of our sense-organs. _Logically_, anyone combination of qualities is to the full as _conceivable_ as any other, and has as distinct a meaning for thought. What necessitates this remark is the confusion deliberately kept up by certain authors (e.g. Spencer, Psychology, §§ 420-7) between the inconceivable and the not-distinctly-imaginable. How do we know _which_ things we cannot imagine unless by first conceiving them, meaning _them_ and not other things?

[391] Arguments seldom make converts in matters philosophical; and some readers, I know, who find that they conceive a certain matter differently from what they did, will still prefer saying they have two different editions of the same conception, one evolved from the other, to saying they have two different conceptions of the same thing. It depends, after all, on how we define conception. We ourselves defined it as the function by which a state of mind means to think the same whereof it thought on a former occasion. Two states of mind will accordingly be two editions of the same conception just so far as either does mean to think what the other thought; but no farther. If either mean to think what the other did not think, it is a different conception from the other. And if either mean to think all that the other thought, _and more_, it is a different conception, so far as the _more_ goes. In this last case one state of mind has two conceptual functions. Each thought decides, by its own authority, which, out of all the conceptive functions open to it, it shall now renew; with which other thought it shall identify itself as a conceiver, and just how far. "The same A which I once meant," it says, "I shall now mean again, and mean it with C as its predicate (or what not) instead of B, as before." In all this, therefore, there is absolutely no changing, but only uncoupling and recoupling of conceptions. Compound conceptions come, as functions of new states of mind. Some of these functions are the same with previous ones, some not. Any changed opinion, then, _partly_ contains new editions (absolutely identical with the old, however) of former conceptions, _partly_ absolutely new conceptions. The division is a perfectly easy one to make in each particular case.

[392] Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§ 10, 14.

[393] 'Conceptualisme honteux,' Rabier, Psychologie, 310.

[394] Exam. of Hamilton, p. 393. Cf. also Logic, bk. ii, chap. v, § 1, and bk iv, chap ii, § 1.

[395] E.g.: "The knowledge of things must mean that the mind finds itself in them, or that, in some way, the difference between them and the mind is dissolved." (E. Caird, Philosophy of Kant, first edition, p. 553.)

[396] 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 significance is always universal."

[397] C. F. Reid's Intellectual Powers, Essay v, chap. iii.--_Whiteness_ is one thing, _the whiteness of this sheet of paper_ another thing.

[398] Mr. F. H. Bradley says the conception or the 'meaning' "consists of a part of the content, cut off, fixed by the mind, and considered apart from the existence of the sign. It would not be correct to add, and referred away to another real subject; for where we think without judging, and where we deny, that description would not be applicable." This seems to be the same doctrine as ours; the application to one or to all subjects of the abstract fact conceived (i.e. its individuality or its universality), constituting a new conception. I am, however, not quite sure that Mr. Bradley steadily maintains this ground. Cf. the first chapter of his Principles of Logic. The doctrine I defend is stoutly upheld in Rosmini's Philosophical System, Introduction by Thomas Davidson, p. 43 (London, 1882).

[399] Lectures on Greek Philosophy, pp. 33-39.

[400] Analysis, chap. viii.

[401] Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§ 11, 12.

[402] It may add to the effect of the text to quote a passage from the essay in 'Mind,' referred to on p. 224.

"Why may we not side with the conceptualists in saying that the universal sense of a word does correspond to a mental fact of _some_ kind, but at the same time, agreeing with the nominalists that all mental facts are modifications of subjective sensibility, why may we not call that fact a 'feeling'? _Man_ meant for _mankind_ is in short a different feeling from _man_ as a mere noise, or from _man_ meant for _that_ man, to wit, John Smith alone. Not that the difference consists simply in the fact that, when taken universally, the word has one of Mr. Galton's 'blended' images of man associated with it. Many persons have seemed to think that these blended or, as Prof. Huxley calls them, 'generic' images are equivalent to concepts. But, in itself, a blurred thing is just as particular as a sharp thing; and the generic character of either sharp image or blurred image depends on its being felt _with its representative function_. This function is the mysterious _plus_, the understood meaning. But it is nothing applied to the image from above, no pure act of reason inhabiting a supersensible and semi-supernatural plane. It can be diagrammatized as continuous with all the other segments of the subjective stream. It is just that staining, fringe, or halo of obscurely felt relation to masses of other imagery about to come, but not yet distinctly in focus, which we have so abundantly set forth [in