Theory of Forms

“ The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object, only the traits which favor that theory. ”

“ Form is not a non-entity but the most important feature of reality, and the pure laws of form are the determinative factors of the world. The sciences of the laws of pure form, logic, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, etc., are therefore the key to a comprehension of the world, and morality is the realization of ideals, i. e., of the conceptions of pure forms, which are higher, nobler, and better than those which have been actualized. ”

“ Everything that exists must exist in some form. And the forms of all things will be found to correspond to their essential nature, or to the kind of life that determines and moulds their forms. The form always corresponds to the essence. ”

“ We have a proposition, consisting of interrelated images, and possibly partly of sensations; (b) we have the feeling of assent, which is presumably a complex sensation demanding analysis; (c) we have a relation, actually subsisting, between the assent and the proposition, such as is expressed by saying that the proposition in question is what is assented to. For other forms of belief-feeling or of content, we have only to make the necessary substitutions in this analysis.
If we are right in our analysis of belief, the use of words in expressing beliefs is apt to be misleading. ”

“ It is unphilosophical to construct a science out of a few of the agencies by which the phenomena are determined, and leave the rest to the routine of practice or the sagacity of conjecture. We either ought not to pretend to scientific forms, or we ought to study all the determining agencies equally, and endeavor, so far as it can be done, to include all of them within the pale of the science; else we shall infallibly bestow a disproportionate attention upon those which our theory takes into account, while we misestimate the rest, and probably underrate their importance. ”

“ We accomplish this interpretation entirely through judgments and combinations of judgments of manifold sorts. The concepts, which the older logic regarded as the true elementary forms of our thinking, are only certain selected types of judgment, such stereotyped judgments as those which make up definitions and classifications, and which appear independent and fundamental because their subject-matter, that is, their intension or extension, is connected through the act of naming with certain words. ”

“ In his philosophy, form plays the most important part. Form is the significant feature of both objective existence and subjective thought. Matter and energy only denote reality, but form characterizes quality. Science traces form, and the nature of all things, the human character included, is constituted by form. ”

“ We know nothing of the particular laws whereby these forms are regulated, as they occur without the conscious precurrence of the usual chains of thought, and often represent forms, and combinations of forms, almost entirely new to us. ”

“ The Conceptualist may urge that the Nominalist's forms of statement and argument exist for the sake of their meaning, namely, judgments [Pg 15] and reasonings; and that the Materialist's laws of Nature are only judgments founded upon our conceptions of Nature; that the truth of observations and experiments depends upon our powers of perception; that perception is inseparable from understanding, and that a system of Induction may be constructed upon the axiom of Causation, regarded as a principle of Reason, just as well as by considering it as a law of Nature, and upon much the same lines. ”

“ We have given the history of the different forms which they successively assume, and we have shown, that in all these changes they remain the same, and of the same authority, whether they enter spontaneously and involuntarily into exercise, and apply themselves to particular and determinate objects, or reflection turns them back upon themselves in order to interrogate them in regard to their nature, or abstraction makes them appear under the form in which their universality and their necessity are manifest. ”

“ In the first place, logic, giving primarily the relations between concepts as such, and the relations between natural facts only secondarily or so far as the facts have been already identified with concepts and defined by them, must of course stand or fall with the conceptual method. But the conceptual method is a transformation which the flux of life undergoes at our hands in the interests of practice essentially and only subordinately in the interests of theory. We live forward, we understand backward, said a danish writer ”

“ Analysis, Abstraction.—First of all, then, thought may be viewed as a carrying further and into higher forms the process of differentiation or separation of presentative elements by means of isolating acts of attention. Thus on selectively considering the color of a rose, or the form of a crystal, we are it is evident differentiating what is given in perception as a complex into a number of parts, and rendering one of these specially prominent and distinct. Such thought-separation is commonly spoken of as Analysis, i. ”

“ The difference between structure and material, between form and content is, roughly speaking, the difference between that which can be expressed and that which cannot be expressed. The fundamental importance for philosophy of that which is vaguely indicated by this distiction can hardly be exaggerated. We shall avoid all the typical mistakes of traditional philosophy if we bear in mind that the inexpressible cannot be expressed, not even by the philosopher. ”

“ As has been already pointed out, this is all that art can do. To test a generalization, by showing that it either follows from, or conflicts with, some stronger induction, some generalization resting on a broader foundation of experience, is the beginning and end of the logic of Induction. ”

“ Therefore, I now desire in the course of these lectures to set aside the terms of a technology which I could not avoid at the outset, and by the recital of my labors and my researches, my disappointments and my discoveries, to show you the painful birth of a science, whose possession entitles me to the honor of addressing you to-day.
Definition of Form.
Form is the garb of substance. It is the expressive symbol of a mysterious truth. It is the trademark of a hidden virtue. It is the actuality of the being. In a word, form is the plastic art of the Ideal. ”

“ But we need not here carry the criticism of metaphysical systems and the attempt to understand their mistakes any further; it is time to draw the important positive conclusions from our result that all knowledge is expression, and that all expression is a rendering of structure, not of content. In the development of science during the last two or three decades the possibility and necessity of a sharp distinction between form and content has become clearer and clearer, and the all-importance of structure has been more fully recognised. ”

“ Let it be considered whether in any science, viewed either as a system of truth or as the foundation of a practical art, there can properly be any other test of the completeness and the fundamental character of its laws, than the completeness of its system of derived truths, and the generality of the methods which it serves to establish. ”

“ But it is an error to suppose, because we resolve to confine our attention to a certain number of the properties of an object, that we therefore conceive, or have an idea of, the object, denuded of its other properties. We are thinking, all the time, of precisely such objects as we have seen and touched, and with all the properties which naturally belong to them; but, for scientific convenience, we feign them to be divested of all properties, except those which are material to our purpose, and in regard to which we design to consider them. ”

“ The product of Generalization or Conception is called a Concept. A Concept is expressed in a word, or words, called "A Term." [Pg 108] A Concept is more than a mere word—it is a general idea. And a Term is more than a mere word—it is the expression of a general idea.
A Concept is built up from the processes of Perception, Abstraction, Comparison and Generalization. We must first perceive; then analyze or abstract qualities; then compare qualities; then synthesize or classify according to the result of the comparison of qualities. ”

“ If we consider the impressions of sense as the mere materials of our experience, such materials may be accumulated in any quantity and in any order. But if we suppose that this matter has a certain form given it, in the act of being accepted by the mind, we can understand how it is that these materials are subject to inevitable rules;—how nothing can be perceived exempt from the relations which belong to such a form. ”

“ The only inference that can fairly be drawn from it is, that in all probability there are seven principles which enter into the composition of a human being. But this inference can by no means establish the correctness of the particular classification under consideration. Otherwise the truth of any seven-fold classification we may choose to adopt can be equally proved by this process of reasoning. Any person can name any seven principles in the complex structure of man and claim the sanction of nature for his classification, as is now done by my critic. ”

“ The form which he employs in the second edition suffers from the same defect. "That which cannot be thought otherwise than as subject, does not exist otherwise than as subject, and is, therefore, substance." ”

“ Similarly, from a phenomenalistic point, of view, the conceptual scheme of physical objects is a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part. ”

“ OF ABSTRACTION, OR THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTIONS. § 1. The metaphysical inquiry into the nature and composition of what have been called Abstract Ideas, or in other words, of the notions which answer in the mind to classes and to general names, belongs not to Logic, but to a different science, and our purpose does not require that we should enter upon it here. We are only concerned with the universally acknowledged fact, that such notions or conceptions do exist. The mind can conceive a multitude of individual things as one assemblage or class ”

“ In so far as they are genuine systems at all, they are not mere “parts” of a whole, but each is the expression, in a concrete conscious life, of the nature of a larger whole from a special “point of view.” The whole, if not equally in every part, is yet as a whole present in every part, and precisely for that reason the category of part and whole is inadequate to express their relation. Somewhat after this fashion we must conceive the structure of any individual whole of lesser individuals. ”

“ Mass, the second principle of structure, demands that those parts of a composition, paragraph, or sentence which are of most importance shall be so placed that they will arrest the attention. By coherence is meant that principle of structure which, in sentences, paragraphs, and whole compositions, places those parts related in thought near together, and keeps separate those parts which are separated in thought. ”

“ We relate one abstract idea with another, framing in the end great systems of logical and mathematical truth, under the respective terms of which the sensible facts of experience eventually arrange themselves, so that our eternal truths hold good of realities also. This marriage of fact and theory is endlessly fertile. What we say is here already true in advance of special verification, IF WE HAVE SUBSUMED OUR OBJECTS RIGHTLY. Our ready-made ideal framework for all sorts of possible objects follows from the very structure of our thinking. ”

“ Outside one another as the phenomena in this phenomenal world are, they form a totality, and are wholly contained in their self-relatedness. In this way the self-relation of the phenomenon is completely specified, it has the Form in itself: and because it is in this identity, has it as essential subsistence. So it comes about that the form is Content: and in its mature phase is the Law of the Phenomenon. ”

“ The true process of conception, as generalisation or general ideation, that is a conscious representation of something as common to many as distinguished from one, involves the active processes of thought, analysis and synthesis, abstraction and comparison. ”

“ When, therefore, it appeared that any of the uniformities which were observed in nature, would result spontaneously from certain other uniformities, no separate act of creative will being supposed necessary for the production of the derivative uniformities, these have not usually been spoken of as laws of nature. According to another mode of expression, the question, What are the laws of nature? ”

“ When we predicate of anything an abstract name, we affirm of the thing that it is one or other of these five things; that it is a case of Existence, or of Coexistence, or of Causation, or of Sequence, or of Resemblance.
It is impossible to imagine any proposition expressed in abstract terms, which cannot be transformed into a precisely equivalent proposition in which the terms are concrete, namely, either the concrete names which connote the attributes themselves, or the names of the fundamenta of those attributes, the facts or phenomena on which they are grounded. ”

“ Formal thought directs its course by this; the wanderings of abstract reflection have in such consciousness an aim, which sets a limit upon them, and leads them back to a human concrete. But the reflections of the scholastics on such a content depend unsupported on the determinations of formal thought, on formal conclusions; and all the determinations regarding natural relationships, laws of nature, &c., that may issue, receive as yet no sustenance from experience; they are not yet determined by the healthy human understanding. ”

“ Definition, though belonging still more to the other and larger kind of logic than to this, is a necessary preliminary to this. The end aimed at by Formal Logic, and attained by the observance of its precepts, is not truth, but consistency. It has been seen that this is the only direct purpose of the rules of the syllogism; the intention and effect of which is simply to keep our inferences or conclusions in complete consistency with our general formulæ or directions for drawing them. ”