We have seen that abstraction, in proportion as it ascends and strengthens, separates itself more and more from the image, until finally, at the moment of pure symbolism, the separation becomes antagonism. This is because there is fundamentally, and from the outset, an opposition of nature and procedure between the two. The ideal of the image is an ever-growing complexity, the ideal of abstraction an ever-growing simplification, since the one is formed by addition, the other by subtraction.
To the man who is gifted with a rich internal vision, the shape of people, of monuments, of landscapes, surges up clearly and well defined: under the influence of attention, and with time, details are added,—the representation completes itself, and approaches more and more completely to the reality. So too with internal audition: witness the musician who hears ideally every detail of a symphony.
The contrary holds for abstraction. “There is,” says Cournot, “an analysis which separates objects, and an analysis which distinguishes without isolating them. The use of the refracting prism is an instance of the analysis which separates or isolates. If, instead of isolating the rays so as to cause them to describe different trajectories, they are made to traverse certain media which have the property of extinguishing a definite color, we are able to distinguish without isolating.”[87]
Abstraction belongs to this last type, with intervention of the process described by Cournot. Attention brings a feature into relief; inattention, and voluntary inhibition, act as extinguishers to the other characteristics.
Let us pass from theory to practice. This antagonism is of current observation, almost a banality, whenever men of imagination are confronted with abstract thinkers. We must of course exclude those who by a rare gift of nature (Goethe), or by the artifice of education, are capable of handling the image and concept alternately.
Let us take the artists as type of the imaginative thinker: the novelist, poet, sculptor, painter, musician, etc. Each dreams of an organic, living work, a complex. Some with words, others with forms, others with sounds; realists with the aid of minute detail, classics by means of general sketches; all make for the same end. Music again, which from its nature seems a thing apart, is an architecture of sounds of amazing complexity, often exciting contradictory states of mind.
Among abstract thinkers (theorists, scientists) the tendency is always towards unity, law, generalities—towards simplification: by what is fundamental and essential, if the man be genuine; by shifting and accidental features, if he is a charlatan. The mathematician and the pure metaphysician have usually a distaste for facts, for multiplicity of detail. A writer whose name has escaped me says: “Every scientist smells of the cadaver.” This is our thesis, under the form of an image. Abstract thought is a cadaver. It would be more just, though less picturesque, to say a skeleton; for scientific abstraction is the bony framework of phenomena.
The antagonism between the image and the idea is thus fundamentally that of the whole and the part. It is impossible to be at the same time an abstract thinker and an imaginative thinker, because one cannot simultaneously think the whole and the part, the group and the fraction; and these two habits of mind while not absolutely exclusive are antagonistic.
In conclusion, have we general ideas, or merely general terms? It must first be remarked that the expressions, “general ideas or notions,” “concepts,” are equivocal or rather multivocal. We have seen that concepts differ widely in their psychological nature according to their degree, having but one characteristic in common—that of being extracts. It is therefore chimerical to attempt to include them all under a single definition. To take the highest only, as most frequently debated, some say, “There are no general ideas but only general terms.” To others the general idea is only an indefinite series of particular ideas, or “a particular idea that the mind proposes as the first stake in a forward march.”[88] To others it is a system of tendencies accompanied or not by the possibility of images.[89] For my own part I prefer the formula of Höffding[90]: “General ideas exist therefore in the sense that we are able to concentrate the attention on certain elements of the individual idea, so that a weaker light falls on the other elements.”