In brief, my idea of a Man is a complex idea compounded of the ideas of all the men I have ever known and of all those I have ever imagined, knit together into a kind of unit by a close association.
The author’s description of the manner in which the class-association begins to be formed, is true and instructive; but does any one’s idea of a man actually include all that the author 292 finds in it? By an inevitable result of the laws of association, it is impossible to form an idea of a man in the abstract; the class-attributes are always represented in the mind as part of an image of an individual, either remembered or imagined; this individual may vary from time to time, and several images of individuals may present themselves either alternatively or in succession: but is it necessary that the name should recal images of all the men I ever knew or imagined, or even all of whom I retain a remembrance? In no person who has seen or known many men, can this be the case. Apart from the ideas of the common attributes, the other ideas whether of attributes or of individual men, which enter into the complex idea, are indefinitely variable not only in kind but in quantity. Some people’s complex idea of the class is extremely meagre, that of others very ample. Sometimes we know a class only from its definition, i.e. from an enumeration of its class-attributes, as in the case of an object which we have only read of in scientific books: in such a case the idea raised by the class-name will not be limited to the class-attributes, for we are unable to conceive any object otherwise than clothed with miscellaneous attributes: but these, not being derived from experience of the objects, may be such as the objects never had, nor could have; while nevertheless the class, and the class-name, answer their proper purpose; they cause us to group together all the things possessing the class-attributes, and they inform us that we may expect those attributes in anything of which that name is predicated.
The defect, as it seems to me, of the view taken of General Names in the text, is that it ignores this distinction between the meaning of a general name, and the remainder of the idea which the general name calls up. That remainder is uncertain, variable, scanty in some cases, copious in others, and connected with the name by a very slight tie of association, continually overcome by counter-associations. The only part of the complex idea that is permanent in the same mind, or common to several minds, consists of the distinctive attributes marked by the class-name. Nothing else is universally present, though 293 something else is always present: but whatever else be present, it is through these only that the class-name does its work, and effects the end of its existence. We need not therefore be surprised that these attributes, being all that is of importance in the complex idea, should for a long time have been supposed to be all that is contained in it. The truest doctrine which can be laid down on the subject seems to be this—that the idea corresponding to a class-name is the idea of a certain constant combination of class attributes, accompanied by a miscellaneous and indefinitely variable collection of ideas of individual objects belonging to the class.—Ed.
CHAPTER IX.
ABSTRACTION.
“I think, too, that he (Mr. Locke) would have seen the advantage of ‘thoroughly weighing,’ not only (as he says) ‘the imperfections of Language;’ but its perfections also: For the perfections of Language, not properly understood, have been one of the chief causes of the imperfections of our knowledge.”—Diversions of Purley, by John Horne Tooke, A.M., i. 37.
THE two cases of Consciousness, CLASSIFICATION, and ABSTRACTION, have not, generally, been well distinguished.
According to the common accounts of Classification, ABSTRACTION was included in it. When it is said, that, in order to classify, we leave out of view all the circumstances in which individuals differ, and retain only those in which they agree; this separating one portion of what is contained in a complex idea, and making it an object of consideration by itself, is the process which is named Abstraction, at least a main part of that process.
It is necessary now to inquire what are the purposes to which this separating of the parts of a complex idea, and considering and naming the separated parts by themselves, is subservient.