A painter.—Cause: nothing. Relation: relations of terms; recital, written report. Law: judges in red robes. Number: vague. Color: contrast between green of plant, and red of drapery. Form: a round block, a woman’s shoulder. Sound: a murmur. Dog: ears of a dog running. Animal: vague collection, as in certain Dutch pictures. Force: hits out with his fists. Goodness: his young mother, seen vaguely. Time: Saturn with his scythe. Infinity: a black hole.
A woman.—Cause: I had been the cause of her son’s success. Law: the government is bad. Color: sees an impressionist picture by her son. Form: names a beautiful person. Goodness and Virtue: names two people who each have this quality. Force: sees men fighting. Relation: social relations between husband and wife. Justice: sees an audience-hall and judges. Dog: sees a dog that bit one of her parents. Infinity: nothing. Time: a metronome.
These two interrogatories are complete. I might proceed by another method: that of taking each general term (law, cause, number, etc.) and quoting all the answers received, among which many would be identical. Such an enumeration would be long and superfluous: we cannot, however, neglect a few of the particulars. For the word cause, several persons (women, artists, people in society) replied “cause célèbre,” “procès célèbre,” for the most part mentioning one only, and that some recent trial. At first this reply annoyed me, and appeared to be useless for my inquiry. Later, on the other hand, I felt it to be instructive, because it characterises better than any description the type which I have denoted as concrete, and the particular turn of this kind of mind, in which the abstract sense does not present itself, at any rate at the beginning.
I may also note two answers given me immediately by a celebrated painter:—Number: I see many brilliant points. Law: I see parallel lines. (Is this the unconscious idea of levelling by the law?)
The terms goodness and virtue suggested answers which are easily summarised: they fall into two categories. (1) Nothing; this answer does not belong to the concrete type; (2) a definite person, who was always named and who thus becomes the incarnation, the concrete representation.
Nearly all the images evoked belong to the visual sense; the word force, however, most frequently called up pure muscular images, or the same accompanied by a vague visual representation. Example—Seeing somebody lifting a weight; I vaguely see something pulling; a weight suspended by a ring; a string drawing on a nail; pressure of my fist in a fluid; the Marshal of Saxony breaking an écu of six pounds, etc.
I have been describing the ordinary and principal form of the concrete type. It consists in the immediate and spontaneous substitution of a particular case (fact or individual) for the general term. In certain observations a slightly different variation may be detected; I have encountered it among several historians and learned men. In the ordinary type, the whole (general) is thought by means of the part (concrete); in the variation, the thinking is by analogy, and the mechanism seems to be reduced to pure association. A few examples will explain the distinction. The replies in duplicate were given by different persons. Number: the “Language of Calculation,” Pythagoras. Cause: Hume’s theory of causality; Kant’s theory. Law: the “Tables of Malaga,” Montesquieu’s definition. Color: the chemistry of the spectrum. Justice: Littré’s definition. Animal: the πὲρι ψυχῆς of Aristotle. Time: a vague metaphysical theory. Relation: discussion of Ampère and Tracy on this subject. Infinity: books on mathematics. Color: treatises of photography, etc.
It might be objected that there is a certain association in ordinary cases as in these; but the distinction will readily be perceived. The former proceed from that which contains, to the content—from the class to the fact: they think the whole by means of the part; there is an internal association. The latter form associations beside and from without. Apparently these do not reach to the concrete, they stop half way; for a complete generality they substitute a semi-generality. Further than this, my data are neither sufficiently numerous, nor clear enough, for the point to be insisted on.
2. Visual Typographic Type. Nothing is easier to define. In its pure form it consists in seeing printed words and nothing more; in three cases words were seen written. Among some the vision of the printed words was accompanied by a concrete image as in the first type, but only for semi-concrete concepts (dog, animal, color); for the higher abstracts (time, cause, infinity, etc.) the typographical vision alone exists.[82] This mode of representation is widely distributed among those who have read much; but there are many exceptions.