ON TOOKE’S ‘DIVERSIONS OF PURLEY’
I would class the merits of Mr. Tooke’s work under three heads: the etymological, the grammatical, and the philosophical. The etymological part is excellent, the grammatical part indifferent, and the philosophical part to the last degree despicable; it is downright, unqualified, unredeemed nonsense. As Mr. Tooke himself says that all metaphysical reasoning is nonsense, it is scarcely rude to say that his metaphysical reasoning is so. It appears to me to be ‘mere midsummer madness.’ He ought not indeed to have meddled with logic or metaphysics after such a declaration; he ought to have supposed that he laboured under some natural defect in this respect, as a man who finds no harmony in any tune that is played to him, may without much modesty conclude that he has no ear for music.
The opinion which I have here advanced of this writer’s merits as a general reasoner may seem a bold one; but the proof of it is not difficult; it is as easy as transcribing. I have only to take a few passages in which he has applied etymology to the illustration of moral and metaphysical truth, to make his undistinguishing admirers blush, not for their idol, but for the weakness and bounded faculties of human nature.
Mr. Tooke lays it down as a maxim, that the mind has neither complex nor abstract ideas. He was in some things a zealot, and his zeal had led him to believe that his system of etymology would in some way or other establish this metaphysical principle, and overturn the established notions of law, morality, philosophy, and divinity. The full development and execution of this project is reserved for a future volume, but there are perpetual hints and intimations of it in the two first, something like the aerial music and flying noises in Prospero’s island. The author seems constantly in his own mind on the point of detecting all imposture and delusion with the Ithuriel spear of etymology, but he as constantly draws back, and postpones his triumph. The second volume of the ‘Diversions’ consists chiefly of about two thousand instances of the etymology of words, to prove that there can be no abstract ideas: scarcely one of which two thousand meanings is anything else but a more abstract idea than the word was in general supposed to convey: for example, the word loaf commonly stands for a pretty substantial, solid, tangible kind of an idea, and is not suspected of any latent, very refined, abstracted meaning. The author shows, on the contrary, that the word has no such palpable, positive meaning, as the particular object to which we apply it, but merely signifies something, any thing, raised or lifted up. A singular method, surely, of reducing all general and abstract signs to individual, physical objects! Yet we find this tiresome catalogue of derivations concluded in this manner.
‘And on this subject of subaudition I will at present exercise your patience no farther: for my own begins to flag. You have now instances of my doctrine in, I suppose, about a thousand words. Their number may be easily increased. But I trust these are sufficient to discard that imagined operation of the mind, which has been termed abstraction: and to prove that what we call by that name, is merely one of the contrivances of language, for the purpose of more speedy communication.’—Page 396, vol. ii.
How a thousand instances of words, signifying a common quality or abstract idea, with something understood (subauditum), can be supposed to discard that imagined operation of the mind called abstraction, or in what subaudition differs from abstraction, or whether there is not something subintellectum, as well as subauditum,—that is, certain circumstances left out by the mind for the necessary progress of thought, as well as in language, for its more speedy communication,—it is not easy to guess. This farcical mummery, this inexplicable dumb show, this emphatical insignificance, neither admits nor deserves any answer.
The only places in the work in which this wary reasoner has fairly committed himself, and given an intelligible explanation of his mode of applying his system to general questions, are in his account of the words, right and wrong, just and unjust, in his list of metaphysical nonentities, demonstrated to be such because they are expressed by the past participles of certain verbs, and in his definition of Truth. These, therefore, I shall give as specimens, and I hope they will be quite satisfactory. The ‘Diversions of Purley,’ it should be observed, is supposed to be carried on in a dialogue between the author and Sir Francis Burdett.
‘Enough, enough,’ says Burdett, ‘innumerable instances of the same may, I grant you, be given from all our ancient authors. But does this import us any thing?’
‘Tooke. Surely, much, if it shall lead us to the clear understanding of the words we use in discourse. For as far as we “know not our own meaning,” as far as “our purposes are not endowed with words to make them known,” so far we “gabble like things most brutish.” But the importance rises higher, when we reflect upon the application of words to metaphysics. And when I say metaphysics, you will be pleased to remember that all general reasoning, all politics, law, morality, and divinity, are merely metaphysics.’ [What is this general reasoning of Mr. Tooke’s?]
‘Well,’ replies his pupil, ‘you have satisfied me that wrong, however written, whether wrang, wrong or wrung, like the Italian torto and the French tort, is merely the past tense or participle of the verb to wring; and has merely that meaning.
‘Tooke. True; it means wrung or wrested from the right or ordered line of conduct. Right is no other than rectum, the past participle of the Latin verb regere. The Italian dritto, and the French droit, are no other than the past participle directum. In the same manner our English word just is the past participle of the verb jubere (jussum).
‘Burdett. What, then, is law?
‘Tooke. It is merely the past participle lag, of the Gothic and Anglo-Saxon verb legan, ponere; and it means something or anything laid down as a rule of conduct. Thus when a man demands his right, he only asks that which it is ordered he shall have. A right conduct is that which is ordered. A right line is that which is ordered or directed, not a random extension, but the shortest between two points. A right and just action is such a one as is ordered and commanded. The right hand is that which custom, and those who have brought us up, have ordered or directed us to use in preference, when one hand only is employed, and the left hand is that which is lieved or left.
‘Burdett. Surely the word right is sometimes used in some other sense. And see, in this newspaper before us, M. Portalis, contending for the concordat, says:—“The multitude are much more impressed with what they are commanded to obey, than with what is proved to them to be right and just.” This will be complete nonsense, if right and just mean ordered and commanded.
‘Tooke. I will not undertake to make sense of the arguments of M. Portalis. The whole of his speech is a piece of wretched mummery, employed to bring back again to France the more wretched mummery of pope and popery. Writers on such subjects are not very anxious about the meaning of their words. Ambiguity and equivocation are their strongholds. Explanation would undo them.
‘Burdett. Well, but Mr. Locke uses the word in a manner hardly to be reconciled with your account of it. He says:—“God has a right to do it, we are his creatures.”
‘Tooke. It appears to me highly improper to say, that God has a right, as it is also to say that God is just. For nothing is ordered, directed, or commanded concerning God. The expressions are inapplicable to the Deity: though they are common, and those who use them have the best intentions. They are applicable only to men, to whom alone language belongs, and of whose sensations only words are the representations; to men, who are by nature the subjects of orders and commands, and whose chief merit is obedience.
‘Burdett. Every thing, then, that is ordered and commanded is right and just.
‘Tooke. Surely; for that is only affirming that what is ordered and commanded is—ordered and commanded.
‘Burdett. These sentiments do not appear to have made you very conspicuous for obedience. There are not a few passages, I believe, in your life, where you have opposed what was ordered and commanded. Upon your own principles, was that right?
‘Tooke. Perfectly.
‘Burdett. How now! was it ordered and commanded that you should oppose what was ordered and commanded? Can the same thing be at the same time both right and wrong?
‘Tooke. Travel back to the island of Melinda, and you will find the difficulty most easily solved. A thing may be at the same time both right and wrong, as well as right and left. It may be commanded to be done, and commanded not to be done. The law, i.e. that which is laid down, may be different by different authorities.
‘I have always been most obedient when most taxed with disobedience. But my right hand is not the right hand of Melinda. The right I revere is not the right adored by sycophants, the jus vagum, the capricious command of princes or ministers. I follow the law of God (which is laid down by him for the rule of my conduct) when I follow the laws of human nature: which, without any testimony, we know must proceed from God, and upon these are founded the rights of man, or what is ordered for man.’
On this passage I will observe that I think it would be difficult for Mr. Tooke himself to find a more precious instance of unmeaning jargon in the writings of any school-divine. Mr. Tooke first pretends gravely to define the essence of law and just from the etymology of those words, by saying that they are something laid down and something ordered; and when pressed by the difficulty that there are many things laid down and many things ordered which are neither ‘law’ nor ‘just,’ makes answer that their obligation depends on a higher species of law and justice, to wit, a law which is no where laid down, and a justice which is no where ordered, except indeed by the nature of things, on which the etymology of these two words does not seem to throw much light. At one time, it seems quite demonstrable that the essence of all law, right, and justice consists in its being ordered or communicated by words: the very idea is absurd, unless we conceive of it as some thing either spoken or written in a book; and yet the very next moment this fastidious reasoner sets up the unwritten, uncommunicated law of God, which he says must conform to the laws of human nature, as the rule of his conduct, and as paramount to all other positive orders and commands whatever. What is this original law of God or nature, which Mr. Tooke sets up as the rule of right? Is it the good of the whole, or self-interest? Is it the voice of reason, or conscience, or the moral sense? Here then we have to set out afresh in our pursuit, and to grope our way as well as we can through the old labyrinth of morality, divinity, and metaphysics. This new-invented patent lamp of etymology goes out just as it is beginning to grow dark, and as the path becomes intricate.
Neither can I at all see why our author should quarrel with M. Portalis for using these words in their common sense. He affirms that the whole of this gentleman’s speech is a piece of wretched mummery, that his distinction between what is right and what is commanded is a senseless ambiguity, and that explanation would undo him. Yet he himself, two pages after, discovers that this distinction has a real meaning in it, and that he has acted upon it all his life. ‘The one,’ he says, ‘is the jus vagum, the capricious command of princes; the other is the law of God and nature.’ It is not impossible but M. Portalis might have given quite as profound an explanation of his own meaning. Junius’s sarcasm did not, it seems, entirely cure Mr. Tooke ‘of the little sneering sophistries of a collegian.’
Mr. Tooke next makes strange havoc with a whole host of metaphysical agents; like Sir Richard Blackmore,
‘Undoes creation at a jerk,
And of redemption makes damn’d work.’
‘Rebelling angels, the forbidden tree,
Heaven, hell, earth, chaos, all’—
are weighed in the balance and found wanting. We cannot say with Marvell, that the argument
‘Holds us a while misdoubting his intent,
That he would ruin (for I saw him strong)
The sacred truths to fable and old song.
(So Sampson groped the temple’s posts in spite)
The world o’erwhelming to revenge his sight.’
For Mr. Tooke leaves us in no doubt about his intent. All these sacred truths are, according to him, so many falsehoods, which by taking possession of certain adjectives and participles, have palmed themselves upon the world as realities, but which, by spelling their names backwards, he proposes to exorcise and reduce to their original nothingness again. Here follows a list of them which he has strung together, as a warning to all other pseudo-substantives. It is rather strange, by the bye, that the author should have resorted to this mode of argument, since he affirms that adjectives are the names of things, as well as substantives; and laughs at Dr. South for saying that they are the names of nothing.
‘These words, these participles and adjectives,’ says Mr. Tooke, ‘not understood as such, have caused a metaphysical jargon and a false morality, which can only be dissipated by etymology. And when they come to be examined you will find that the ridicule which Dr. Conyers Middleton has so justly bestowed upon the papists for their absurd coinage of saints, is equally applicable to ourselves and to all other metaphysicians; whose moral deities, moral causes, and moral qualities are not less ridiculously coined and imposed upon their followers.
Fate
Destiny
Luck
Lot
Chance
Accident
Heaven
Hell
Providence
Prudence
Innocence
Substance
Fiend
Angel
Apostle
Saint
Spirit
True
False
Desert
Merit
Fault. &c. &c.
as well as just, right, and wrong, are all merely participles poetically embodied and substantiated by those who use them.
‘So Church, for instance (Dominicum aliquid) is an adjective; and formerly a most wicked one: whose misinterpretation caused more slaughter and pillage of mankind than all the other cheats together.’
Sir Francis says, ‘Something of this sort I can easily perceive, but not to the extent you carry it. I see that those sham deities, Fate and Destiny, aliquid fatum, quelque chose destinée, are merely the past participles of fari and destiner. That Chance (“high arbiter,” as Milton calls him) and his twin-brother Accident are merely the participles of escheoir, cheoir, and cadere. And that to say, it befell me by chance or by accident, is absurdly saying it befell me by falling.
‘I agree with you, that Providence, Prudence, Innocence, Substance, and all the rest of that tribe of qualities (in ence and ance) are merely the neuter plurals of the present participles of ordere, nocere, stare, &c. &c. That Angel, Saint, Spirit, are the past participles αγγελλειυ, sanciri, spirare. That the Italian cucolo, a cuckoo, gives us the verb to cucol, and its past participle cuckold.’
And what if it does: will Mr. Tooke therefore pretend to say that there is no such thing? This is indeed turning etymology to a good account. It is clearing off old scores with a vengeance, and establishing morality on an entirely new basis. For my own part, I can only say of the whole of the reasoning of this author, with Voltaire’s Candide, ‘la tête me tourne: on ne sait ou l’on est.’ Whether any or all of those metaphysical beings enumerated by Mr. Tooke do or do not exist, what their nature or qualities are, whether modes, relatives, substances, I shall not here undertake to determine, but I do conceive that none of these questions can be resolved in any way by inquiring whether the names denoting them are not the past participles of certain verbs. A shorter method would I think be to say at once that all metaphysical and moral terms, whether participles or not, are but names, that names are not things, and that therefore the things themselves have no existence. It is upon this philosophical principle that the heroical Jonathan Wild proceeds in his definition of the word Honour, for after losing himself to no purpose in the common metaphysical jargon on the subject, and in moral causes and qualities, he comes at last to this clear and unembarrassed conclusion,—‘That honour consists in the word honour, and nothing else.’
I will only give one instance more of this reformed system of logic and metaphysics.
‘Burdett. I still wish for an explanation of one word more: which on account of its extreme importance ought not to be omitted. What is Truth? You know when Pilate had asked the same question, he went out and would not stay for an answer, and from that time to this no answer has been given. And from that time to this mankind have been wrangling and tearing each other to pieces for the truth, without once considering the meaning of the word.’
‘Tooke. This word will give us no trouble. Like the other words, true is also a past participle of the Saxon verb treowan, confidere, to think, to believe firmly, to be thoroughly persuaded of, to trow. True, as we now write it, or trew, as it was formerly written, means simply and merely that which is trowed, and instead of its being a rare commodity upon earth, except only in words, there is nothing but truth in the world.
‘That every man, in his communication with others, should speak that which he troweth, is of so great importance to mankind, that it ought not to surprise us, if we find the most extravagant and exaggerated praises bestowed upon truth. But truth supposes mankind; for whom and by whom alone the word is formed, and to whom only it is applicable. If no man, no truth. There is therefore no such thing as eternal, immutable, everlasting truth; unless mankind, such as they are at present, be also eternal, immutable, and everlasting. Two persons may contradict each other, and yet both speak truth. For the truth of one person may be opposite to the truth of another. To speak truth may be a vice as well as a virtue; for there are many occasions when it ought not to be spoken. If you reject my explanation, find out if you can some other possible meaning of the word, or content yourself with Johnson, by saying that true is not false, and false is—not true. For so he explains the words.’—Vol. ii. p. 407.
In a note the author adds, ‘Mr. Locke, in the second book of his Essay, chapter xxxii., treats of true and false ideas, and is much distressed throughout the whole chapter, because he had not in his mind any determinate meaning of the word true. If that excellent man had himself followed the advice which he gave to his disputing friends concerning the word liquor; if he had followed his own rule, previously to writing about true and false ideas, and had determined what meaning he applied to true, being, thing, real, right, wrong, he could not have written the above chapter, which exceedingly distresses the reader, who searches for a meaning where there is none to be found.’
Whether Mr. Locke would have been satisfied with Mr. Tooke’s account of these words, I cannot say. I know that I am not. I do not think it the true one. It is therefore not the true one. Mr. Tooke thinks it is, and therefore it is the true one. Which of us is right? That what a man thinks, he thinks, and that if he speaks what he thinks, he speaks truth in one principal sense of the word, is what does not require much illustration; but whether what he thinks is true or false, whether his opinion is right or wrong, or whether there is not another possible and actual meaning of the terms besides that given by Mr. Tooke, is the old difficulty, which remains just where it was before, in spite of etymology.
The application of the theory of language to the philosophy of the mind, Mr. Tooke has reserved for a volume by itself: the principle, however, which he means to establish, he has very explicitly laid down in the beginning of his first volume. ‘The business of the mind,’ he says, ‘as far as it concerns language, appears to me to be very simple. It extends no farther than to receive impressions, that is, to have sensations or feelings. What are called its operations, are merely the operations of language. The greatest part of Mr. Locke’s Essay, that is, all which relates to what he calls the composition, abstraction, complexity, generalization, relation, &c. of ideas, does indeed merely concern language. If he had been sooner aware of the inseparable connexion between words and knowledge, he would not have talked of the composition of ideas; but would have seen that the only composition was in the terms; and consequently that it was as improper to talk of a complex idea as of a complex star. It is an easy matter, upon Mr. Locke’s own principles and a physical consideration of the senses and the mind, to prove the impossibility of the composition of ideas; and that they are not ideas, but merely terms which are general and abstract.’—Vol. i. pp. 39, 51, &c.
Now I grant that Mr. Locke’s own principles, and a physical consideration of the mind, do lead to the conclusion here stated, that is, to an absurdity; and it is from thence I have endeavoured to show more than once that those principles, and the considering the mind as a physical thing, are themselves absurd. How a term can be complex otherwise than from the complexity of its meaning, that is, of the idea attached to it, is difficult to understand.
As to the other position, that we have no general ideas, but that it is the terms only that are general and abstract, Mr. Tooke has borrowed this piece of philosophy from Mr. Locke, who borrowed it from Hobbes. ‘Universality’ says Mr. Locke, as quoted by our author, ‘belongs not to things, which are all of them particular in their existence. When, therefore, we quit particulars, the generals that rest are only creatures of our own; their general nature being nothing but the capacity they are put into of signifying or representing many particulars.’ I have, however, before shown how very loose, uncertain, and wavering, Mr. Locke’s reasoning on this subject is, though I cannot agree with Mr. Tooke that it is therefore ‘very different from that incomparable author’s usual method of proceeding.’ There is one question which may be asked with respect to this statement, which, if fairly answered, will perhaps, decide the point in dispute: viz. if there is no general nature in things, or if we have no general idea of what they have in common or the same, how is it that we know when to apply the same general terms to different particulars, which on this principle will have nothing left to connect them together in the mind? For example, take the words, a white horse. Now say they, it is the terms which are general or common, but we have no general or abstract idea corresponding to them. But if we had no general idea of white, nor any general idea of a horse, we should have nothing more to guide us in applying this phrase to any but the first horse, than in applying the terms of an unknown tongue to their respective objects. For it is the idea of something general or common between the several objects, which can alone determine us in assigning the same name to things which, considered as particulars, or setting aside that general nature, are perfectly distinct and independent. Without this link in the mind, this general perception of the qualities of things, the terms a white horse could no more be applied, and would, in fact, be no more applicable to animals of this description generally, than to any other animal. In short, what is it that ‘puts the same common name into a capacity of signifying many particulars,’ but that those particulars are, and are conceived to be of the same kind? That is, general terms necessarily imply a class of things and ideas. Language without this would be reduced to a heap of proper names: and we should be just as much at a loss to name any object generally, from its agreement with others, as to know whether we should call the first man we met in the street by the name of John or Thomas. The existence and use of general terms is alone a sufficient proof of the power of abstraction in the human mind; nor is it possible to give even a plausible account of language without it. But Mr. Tooke has on all possible occasions sacrificed common sense to a false philosophy and epigrammatic logic. In opposition to this author’s assertion, that we have neither complex nor abstract ideas, I think it may be proved to a demonstration that we have no others. If our ideas were absolutely simple and individual, we could have no idea of any of those objects which in this erring, half-thinking philosophy are called individual, as a table or a chair, a blade of grass, or a grain of sand. For every one of these includes a certain configuration, hardness, colour, &c. i.e. ideas of different things, and received by different senses, which must be put together by the understanding before they can be referred to any particular thing, or form one idea. Without the cementing power of the mind, all our ideas would be necessarily decomposed and crumbled down into their original elements and flexional parts. We could indeed never carry on a chain of reasoning on any subject, for the very links of which this chain must consist, would be ground to powder. No two of these atomic impressions could ever club together to form even a sensible point, much less should we be able ever to arrive at any of the larger masses, or nominal descriptions of things. All nature, all objects, all parts of all objects would be equally ‘without form and void.’ The mind alone is formative, to borrow the expression of a celebrated German writer, or it is that alone which by its pervading and elastic energy unfolds and expands our ideas, that gives order and consistency to them, that assigns to every part its proper place, and that constructs the idea of the whole. Ideas are the offspring of the understanding, not of the senses. In other words, it is the understanding alone that perceives relation, but every object is made up of a bundle of relations. In short, there is no object or idea which does not consist of a number of parts arranged in a certain manner, but of this arrangement the parts themselves cannot be conscious. A ‘physical consideration of the senses and the mind’ can never therefore account for our ideas, even of sensible objects. Mr. Locke’s own principles do indeed exclude all power of understanding from the human mind. The manner in which Hobbes and Berkeley have explained the nature of mathematical demonstration upon this system shows its utter inadequacy to any of the purposes of general reasoning, and is a plain confession of the necessity of abstract ideas. Mr. Hume considers the principle that abstraction is not an operation of the mind, but of language, as one of the most capital discoveries of modern philosophy, and attributes it to Bishop Berkeley. Berkeley has however only adopted the arguments and indeed almost the very words of Hobbes. The latter author in the passage which has been already quoted says, ‘By this imposition of names, some of larger, some of stricter signification, we turn the reckoning of the consequences of things imagined in the mind into a reckoning of the consequences of appellations. For example, a man that hath no use of speech at all, such as is born and remains perfectly deaf and dumb, if he set before his eyes a triangle, and by it two right angles, (such as are the corners of a square figure) he may by meditation compare and find that the three angles of that triangle are equal to those two right angles that stand by it. But if another triangle be shewn him different in shape from the former, he cannot know without a new labour, whether the three angles of that also be equal to the same. But he that hath the use of words, when he observes that such equality was consequent not to the length of the sides, nor to any other particular thing in his triangle, but only to this, that the sides were straight and the angles three, and that that was all for which he named it a triangle, will boldly conclude universally, that such equality of angles is in all triangles whatsoever; and register his invention in these general terms: Every triangle hath its three angles equal to two right ones. And thus the consequence found in one particular, comes to be registered and remembered as an universal rule; and discharges our mental reckoning of time and place, and delivers us from all labour of the mind saving the first, and makes that which was found true here and now to be true in all times and places.’—Leviathan, p. 14.
Bishop Berkeley gives the same view of the nature of abstract reasoning in the introduction to his ‘Principles of Human Knowledge.’ ‘But here,’ he says, ‘it will be demanded how we can know any proposition to be true of all particular triangles, except we have first seen it demonstrated of the abstract idea of a triangle, which agrees equally to all. To which I answer, that though the idea I have in view, whilst I make the demonstration be, for instance, that of an isosceles rectangular triangle, whose sides are of a determinate length, I may nevertheless be certain it extends to all other rectilinear triangles of what sort or bigness soever. And that because neither the right angle nor the equality nor the determinate length of the sides are at all concerned in the demonstration. ’Tis true, the diagram I have in view includes all these particulars, but then there’s not the least mention made of them in the proof of the proposition. It is not said the three angles are equal to two right ones, because one of them is a right angle, or because the sides comprehending it are of the same length; which sufficiently shows that the right angle might have been oblique and the sides unequal, and for all that the demonstration have held good. And for this reason it is that I conclude that to be true of any oblique angular or scalenon, which I had demonstrated of a particular right angled equicrural triangle, and not because I demonstrated the proposition of the abstract idea of a triangle.’—Page 34.
This answer does not appear to me satisfactory. It amounts to this, that though the diagram we have in view includes a number of particular circumstances, not applicable to other cases, yet we know the principle to be true generally, because there is not the least mention made of these particulars in the proof of the proposition.
When it is asserted that we must necessarily have the idea of a particular size whenever we think of a man in general, all that is intended I believe is that we must think of a particular height. This idea it is supposed must be particular and determinate, just as we must draw a line with a piece of chalk, or make a mark with the slider of a measuring instrument in one place and not in another. I think it may be shown that this view of the question is also extremely fallacious and an inversion of the order of our ideas. The height of the individual is thus resolved into the consideration of the lines terminating or defining it, and the intermediate space of which it properly consists is entirely overlooked. For let us take any given height of a man, whether tall, short, or middle-sized, and let that height be as visible as you please, I would ask whether the actual length to which it amounts does not consist of a number of other lengths, as if it be a tall man, the length will be six feet, and each of these feet will consist of as many inches, and those inches will be again made up of decimals, and those decimals of other subordinate and infinitesimal parts, which must be all distinctly perceived and added together before the sum total which they compose can be pretended to be a distinct, particular, or individual idea. In any given visible object we have always a gross, general idea of something extended, and never of the precise length; for this precise length as it is thought to be is necessarily composed of a number of lengths too many, and too minute to be separately attended to or jointly conceived by the mind, and at last loses itself in the infinite divisibility of matter. What sort of distinctness or individuality can therefore be found in any visible image or object of sense, I cannot well conceive: it seems to me like seeking for certainty in the dancing of insects in the evening sun, or for fixedness and rest in the motions of the sea. All particulars are nothing but generals, more or less defined according to circumstances, but never perfectly so. The knowledge of any finite being rests in generals, and if we think to exclude all generality from our ideas of things, as implying a want of perfect truth and clearness, we must be constrained to remain in utter ignorance. Let any one try the experiment of counting a flock of sheep driven fast by him, and he will soon find his imagination unable to keep pace with the rapid succession of objects; and his idea of a particular number slide into the general notion of multitude: not that because there are more objects than he can possibly count he will think there are none, or that the word flock will present to his mind a mere name without any idea corresponding to it. Every act of the attention, every object we see or think of, offers a proof of the same kind.
The application of this view of the subject to explain the difference between the synthetical and analytical faculties, between generalization and abstraction in the proper acceptation of this last word, between common sense or feeling and understanding or reason, demands a separate essay.
I do not think it possible ever to arrive at the truth upon these, or to prove the existence of general or abstract ideas, by beginning in Mr. Locke’s method with particular ones. This faculty of abstraction or generalization (to use the words indifferently) is indeed by most considered as a sort of artificial refinement upon our other ideas, as an excrescence, no ways contained in the common impressions of things, nor scarcely necessary to the common purposes of life; and is by Mr. Locke altogether denied to be among the faculties of brutes. It is the ornament and top-addition of the mind of man which proceeding from simple sensation upwards, is gradually sublimed into the abstract notions of things: ‘so from the root springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves more airy, last the bright consummate flower.’ On the other hand, I imagine that all our notions from first to last are, strictly speaking, general and abstract, not absolute and particular, and that this faculty mixes itself more or less with every act of the mind, and in every moment of its existence.
Lastly, I conceive that the mind has not been fairly dealt with in this and other questions of the same kind. The difficulty belonging to the notion of abstraction or comprehension it is perhaps impossible ever to clear up: but that is no reason why we should discard those operations from the human mind any more than we should deny the existence of motion, extension, or curved lines in nature, because we cannot explain them. Matter alone seems to have the privilege of presenting difficulties and contradictions at any time, which pass current under the name of facts; but the moment any thing of this kind is observed in the understanding, all the petulance of logicians is up in arms. The mind is made the mark on which they vent all the modes and figures of their impertinence; and metaphysical truth has in this respect fared like the milk-white hind, the emblem of pure faith, in Dryden’s fable, which
‘Has oft been chased
With Scythian shafts and many winged wounds
Aimed at her heart, was often forced to fly,
And doomed to death, though fated not to die.’