(This position combats mediation under its form of abstraction.)
“Can we not know immediately by intuition those objects that philosophy strives in vain to comprehend? in short, are not God, Freedom and Immortality certain to us and yet indemonstrable?”
(This position combats mediation as involved in a system of Philosophy.)
These questions arise only in the mind that has already gone beyond the doctrine that it attempts to defend, and hence a self refutation is easily drawn out of the source from whence they originate.
ABSTRACTION.
(a) It will be readily granted that all knowing involves distinction. We must distinguish one object from another.
(b) But the process of distinguishing is a process that involves abstraction. For in separating this object from that, I contrast its marks, properties, attributes, with those of the other. In seizing upon one characteristic I must isolate it from all others, and this is nothing more nor less than abstraction.
(c) Therefore it is absurd to speak of knowing without abstraction, for this enters into the simplest act of perception.
(d) Nor is this a subjective defect, an “impotency of our mental structure,” as some would be ready to exclaim at this point. For it is just as evident that things themselves obtain reality only through these very characteristics. One thing preserves its distinctness from another by means of its various determinations. Without these determinations all would collapse into one, nay, even “one” would vanish, for distinction being completely gone, one-ness is not possible. This is the “Principle of Indiscernibles” enunciated by Leibnitz. Thus distinction is as necessary objectively as subjectively. The thing abstracts in order to be real. It defends itself against what lies without it by specializing itself into single properties, and thus becoming in each a mere abstraction.
(e) Moreover, besides this prevalence of abstraction in the theoretic field, it is still more remarkable in the practical world. The business man decries abstractions. He does not know that every act of the will is an abstraction, and that it is also preceded by an abstraction. When he exhorts you to “leave off abstractions and deal with concrete realities,” he does this: (1.) he regards you as he thinks you are; (2.) he conceives you as different, i. e. as a practical man; (3.) he exhorts you to change from your real state to the possible one which he conceives of (through the process of abstraction). The simplest act with design—that of going to dinner, for example—involves abstraction. If I raise my arm on purpose, I first abstract from its real position, and think it under another condition.