Abstract idea

“ The entire falsity of this whole philosophy of the abstract, and the nullity of all abstractions considered as self-subsisting objects of thought, will be more directly shown hereafter. For the present we say no more on this head, but proceed to consider another form in which the argument from abstract, à priori principles is presented.
We have an idea of the good, the beautiful, the true, as being necessary, universal, and eternal. ”

“ The points of resemblance thus selected or abstracted from a number of particulars compose what we call an abstract or general idea, and from a comparison of such abstract or general ideas with each other we arrive at general conclusions, which define the relations of the ideas to each other. ”

“ Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us. ”

“ For this is one of the most extraordinary circumstances in the present affair, that after the mind has produc’d an individual idea, upon which we reason, the attendant custom, reviv’d by the general or abstract term, readily suggests any other individual, if by chance we form any reasoning, that agrees not with it. ”

“ I may be allowed to set off one paradox against another, and as these writers affirm that all abstract ideas are particular images, so I shall try to prove that all particular images are abstract ideas. ”

“ No abstract definitions exist at the outset; abstraction is ulterior and derivative; foremost in each science must be placed examples, experiences, evident facts; from these we derive our general idea. ”

“ My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves. ”

“ As, by some of the later sects of philosophers, particularly by the Stoics, all species, or specific essences, were regarded as mere creatures of the mind, formed by abstraction, which had no real existence external to the thoughts that conceived them, the word Idea came, by degrees, to its present signification, to mean, first, an abstract thought or conception ”

“ That this is the sense and arguing of the author will further appear by his answering the question he in another place puts: 'Since all things that exist are only particulars, how come we by general terms?' His answer is: 'Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas.' ("Essay on Human Understanding," Bk. III, chap. III, paragraph 6.) But it seems that a word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an abstract general idea, but of several particular ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the mind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our complex or abstract ideas are symbols which only take a meaning so far as we resolve them into the detached impressions which in the sum they represent, or recall the objects, each with its own before and after, from which they were originally taken. ”

“ And it is on all hands agreed that there is need of great toil and labour of mind, to emancipate our thoughts from particular objects, and raise them to those sublime speculations that are conversant about abstract ideas. From all which the natural consequences should seem to be, that so difficult a thing as forming abstract ideas was not necessary for communication, which is so familiar to all sorts of men. ”

“ Yet we hold that whatever the mind cognizes at all, it cognizes in the concrete, as an individual object. And therefore we deny that the ideas of the necessary, the universal, of necessary cause, and the like, which the author calls intuitions, and treats as first principles, necessary assumptions, abstract ideas, etc., are abstractions, mental conceptions, or generalizations ”

“ Hence an intellectual concept abstracts from everything sensuous, it is not abstracted from sensuous things, and perhaps would be more correctly called abstracting than abstract. Intellectual concepts it is more cautious, therefore, to call pure ideas, and concepts given only empirically, abstract ideas. ”

“ But like all abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can treat the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an abstract treatment of the life of philosophy itself. ”

“ All other men have it in common with me to be 'I': just as it is common to all my sensations and conceptions to be mine. But 'I,' in the abstract, as such, is the mere act of self-concentration or self-relation, in which we make abstraction from all conception and feeling, from every state of mind and every peculiarity of nature, talent, and experience. ”

“ Your trouble, I repeat, is with definitions. You have grasped that man performs what is called abstract reasoning, you have made a definition of abstract reason, and, betrayed by that great maker of theories, the ego, you have come to think that all reasoning is abstract and that what is not abstract reason is not reason at all. ”

“ Both theoretically and practically this power of framing abstract concepts is one of the sublimest of our human prerogatives. We come back into the concrete from our journey into these abstractions, with an increase both of vision and of power. It is no wonder that earlier thinkers, forgetting that concepts are only man-made extracts from the temporal flux, should have ended by treating them as a superior type of being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed in nature to the turbid, restless lower world. ”

“ For, when the highest product of abstract thought is analysed, the ultimate elements must always be found to consist in material given directly by the senses; and every stage in the symbolic construction of ideas, in which the process of abstraction consists, depends on acts of perception taking place in the lower stages’. ”

“ Something that will be of some real practical use is, in my opinion, what we want; but to talk about abstract theories, idealities, and things that have not much substance or reality in them, I do not think is of much use to anybody. ”

“ Thus scientific objects are the concrete causal characters, though we arrive ‘at them by a route of apprehension which is a process of abstraction. In the same way, what, in the form of a sense-object, is concrete for our awareness, is abstract in its character of a complex of relations between scientific objects. ”

“ In all my critical and theoretical writing I wish to be as little abstract as possible, and to study first principles, not so much as they exist in the brain of the theorist, but as they may be discovered, alive and in [ix] effective action, in every achieved form of art. ”

“ If ideas be particular in their nature, and at the same time finite in their number, ’tis only by custom they can become general in their representation, and contain an infinite number of other ideas under them. ”

“ Abstract theory was to be valued only just so far as it might serve to clear the tablet of the mind from suppositions no more than half realisable, or wholly visionary, leaving it in flawless evenness of surface to the impressions of an experience, concrete and direct. ”

“ Power, wisdom, and goodness, may, indeed, be regarded in one way as abstract qualities. We can reason about them, and hold them up to our contemplation, as something distinct or different from the bodies in which they reside. Hence all our speculations respecting the laws of nature, the primary and secondary qualities of matter, the relations of cause and effect, to [372] which principle of abstraction in man the various sciences owe their origin. The inductive philosophy is entirely built upon it. ”

“ And this is the only true and legitimate abstraction which holds good both for science and for life. But thus to abstract our own Me and subjective peculiarities is a duty which is far from being commonly observed, and is, in truth, extremely difficult, even with the greatest honesty of purpose, perfectly to accomplish. ”

“ The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal. ”

“ Taken as a problem in logic, the answer is, of course, that absolutely nothing in the way of abstract mental content is inferable from the mere fact that we can use intelligently words of which the meaning is abstract. ”

“ The knowledge upon which our ideas rest is general, and the only difference between abstract and particular, is that of being more or less general, of leaving out more or fewer circumstances, and more or fewer objects, perceived either at once or in succession, and forming either a particular whole, aggregate, or a class of things. ”

“ Now, if we will annex a meaning to our words, and speak only of what we can conceive, I believe we shall acknowledge that an idea which, considered in itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort. ”

“ A universal or general conception is of an entire class, or of something belonging to an entire class, of things. The conception of an abstract quality is, taken by itself, neither universal nor particular. [396] If I abstract white from the rest of the wintry landscape this morning, it is a perfectly definite conception, a self-identical quality which I may mean again ”

“ It is evident, that none of the rules of composition are fixed by reasonings a priori, or can be esteemed abstract conclusions of the understanding, from comparing those habitudes and relations of ideas, which are eternal and immutable. ”

“ As there is, according to the common opinion, no object outside the magnitudes of sense, it follows that the ideas of reason are contained in the forms of sense, both the so-called abstract conceptions and the various qualities and attributes that determine sensible phenomena. ”

“ But as both only represent true humanity very imperfectly—that normal humanity which requires the absolute harmony of these two operations—their contradictory objections have no weight, and if their judgments prove anything, it is rather that the author has succeeded in attaining his end. The abstract thinker finds that the substance of the work is solidly thought; the reader of intuitive ideas finds his style lively and animated ”

“ Abstract terms result from the analysis of concrete things into their qualities; and conversely a concrete term may be viewed as denoting the synthesis of qualities into an individual thing. When several things agree in more than one quality, there may be an abstract term denoting the union of qualities in which they agree, and omitting their peculiarities; as 'human nature' denotes the common qualities of men, 'civilisation' the common conditions of civilised peoples. ”

“ Their completeness of abstraction from the accidents of experience, from the differences, qualifications, variations which contribute so largely to the personal interests of life, this it is which makes the abstract sciences demonstrative, exact, and universally applicable. In so far, therefore, as we are permitted to grasp the conception of a perfectly abstract existence prior to, and underlying, and enclosing, all separate existences, so far also do we get to a conception which is demonstrative, exact, and universally applicable throughout the whole world of knowable objects. ”

“ If you want to express the truth in its wholeness, you must not merely say first, There is an idea, and secondly, There is also an object, and thirdly, These two correspond. For when you speak thus, you deal in abstractions; you yourself so far seek as your own Other the very meaning and sense of these abstractions: and merely to speak thus is to define neither truth nor Being. You must rather say: There is an embodied life, a fulfilled meaning, an empirically expressed intent, an individual whole, that attains its own end. ”

“ And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience—metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. ”

“ The essences of things in the abstract mean nothing, nor can they become the object of affirmation or negation, unless we suppose a necessary being in which is the reason of the relations of things, and of the possibility of their existence. ”

“ Accordingly, if you have a logical head, you can deduce a variety of conclusions respecting the relationships between these abstract entities. Furthermore, if the abstractions are well-founded, that is to say, if they do not abstract from everything that is important in experience, the scientific thought which confines itself to these abstractions will arrive at a variety of important truths relating to our experience of nature. We all know those clear-cut trenchant intellects, immovably encased in a hard shell of abstractions. ”

“ We must admit the notion of abstraction, first or last, unless any one will contend for this infinite refinement in our ideas of things, or assert that we have no idea at all. For the same process takes place in it, and is absolutely necessary to our most particular notions of things, as well as our most general, namely, that of abstracting from particulars, or of passing over the minute differences of things, taking them in the gross, and attending to the general effect of a number of distinguished and distinguishable impressions. ”