We might say that the percept is the mind’s immediate image of a thing or quality, and the concept is the result of the storing up and grouping and recombining of percepts. Thus a lasting mental picture is secured; and my idea of horse, for instance, is so clear and definite a thing in my mind that if I should never again see a particular horse, I should yet always be able to think accurately of a horse.
Concepts are of two kinds—concrete and abstract.
A concrete concept, or concrete idea (for concept and idea are interchangeably used), is an idea of a particular object or quality.
| Examples: | This wine-sap apple (object concept). |
|---|---|
| This sweet orange (quality concept). |
An abstract concept, or abstract idea, is a mental reproduction of a quality or an object dissociated from any particular setting or particular experience.
Abstract ideas are of two kinds. We speak of them as abstract object concepts and as abstract quality concepts. An abstract object concept we might call a generalized idea, an idea comprehending all objects having certain things in common.
Example: My idea of animal includes many scores of very different individual animals, but they all have bodies and heads and extremities. They all have some kind of digestive apparatus; they breathe, and can move.
An abstract quality concept is easier to think than to explain. It is as though the mind in considering a multitude of different objects found a certain quality common to many of them, and it “abstracted,” i. e., drew this particular quality, and only this, from them all, and then imagined it as a something in itself which it calls redness, or whiteness, or goodness. Thereafter, whenever it finds something like it anywhere else again it says, “That is like my redness.” So I call it “red.” In other words, consciousness thereafter can determine in a newly discovered object something it knows well merely because that something corresponds to a representation which experience and memory have already formed.
These comprehensive concepts, or universals, as some psychologists term them, the mind, having pieced together from experience and memory, holds as independent realities, not primarily belonging to this or that, but lending themselves to this or that. For example: My mind says “white,” and sees white in some object. But I see the white only because my mind has a quality concept, whiteness. This outside object corresponds to my concept. I recognize the likeness and call it “white.”
I speak of goodness, or purity, of benevolence; or of fulness, emptiness, scantiness. There is no object or quality in the outside world I can say is goodness, or fulness. But I do see things in the external world through my ideas of goodness or fulness that correspond to these ideas. They have some of the qualities the ideas embrace; and so I point them out and say, “This represents purity; that, impurity”; or, “This is full, that is empty.” One satisfies my concept of purity, while the other does not. One fulfils my concept of fulness; the other does not. And because we can never point out any one quality in the outside world and say “This is purity, and all of purity; this is goodness; or this good plus this good plus this makes all of goodness”; because of this impossibility we speak of these concepts as having reality somewhere. They are absolutes, universals, abstract quality concepts—the unfound all of which the things we call pure and good are but the part.