Abstract noun

“ Select in the following sentences the nouns that are names of objects which have a real and separate existence outside of the mind, and those which are names of things that have no real existence and are only thought of in the mind:—
A noun that is the name of an object which has a real and separate existence outside of the mind, is called a concrete noun; as, gold, water.
A noun that is the name of something which has not a real and separate existence outside of the mind, is called an abstract noun ”

“ When afterwards they began to perceive the difference between the subject and attribute, and between verb and noun, a distinction which required no mean effort of genius, the substantives for a time were only so many proper names, the infinitive was the only tense, and as to adjectives, great difficulties must have attended the development of the idea that represents them, since every adjective is an abstract word, and abstraction is an unnatural and very painful operation. ”

“ A Concrete Term is the name of a thing or of a quality of a thing expressed as an adjective and as merely a quality; while an Abstract Term is the name of a quality of a thing, expressed as a noun and as a "thing" in itself. ”

“ When it is said that art differs from science, that the power of art is founded on fact, that disposition is the thing to be created, the words italicized are pure abstract nouns; but in case an art or a science, or the arts and sciences, be spoken of, the abstract idea is partly lost. ”

“ With an infinitive or a participle denoting being or action in the abstract, an adjective is sometimes also taken abstractly; (that is, without reference to any particular noun, pronoun, or other subject;) as, "To be sincere, is to be wise, innocent, and safe."—Hawkesworth. "Capacity marks the abstract quality of being able to receive or hold."—Crabb's Synonymes. "Indeed, the main secret of being sublime, is to say great things in few and plain words."—Hiley's Gram., p. ”

“ The names most adequate to their objects in our languages are abstract nouns, because they represent a simple operation of the mind. When I pronounce the word compressibility or immortality, all that is in the idea is contained in the word; but if I take a real being, an object existing in Nature, it will be impossible for language to put into the word all the notions which that being or that object awakens in the mind. Language is forced to select. ”

“ It may be objected to our definition of an abstract name, that not only the names which we have called abstract, but adjectives, which we have placed in the concrete class, are names of attributes; that white, for example, is as much the name of the colour, as whiteness is. But (as before remarked) a word ought to be considered as the name of that which we intend to be understood by it when we put it to its principal use, that is, when we employ it in predication. ”

“ Every general name, if used as a concrete term, has, or may have, a corresponding abstract term. Sometimes the concrete term is modified to form the abstract, as 'greedy—greediness'; sometimes a word is adapted from another language, as 'man—humanity'; sometimes a composite term is used, as 'mercury—the nature of mercury,' etc. The same concrete may have several abstract correlatives, as 'man—manhood, humanity, human nature' ”

“ If the name be abstract, its denotation is the same with the connotation of the corresponding concrete; it designates directly the attribute, which the concrete term implies. To give a precise meaning to general names is, then, to fix with steadiness the attribute or attributes connoted by each concrete general name, and denoted by the corresponding abstract. Since abstract names, in the order of their creation, do not precede but follow concrete ones, as is proved by the etymological fact that they are almost always derived from them ”

“ When the author says that abstract relative names differ from other abstract names in not being wholly void of connotation, inasmuch as they connote their correlatives, priority connoting posteriority, and posteriority priority, he deserts the specific meaning which he has sought to attach to the word connote, and falls back upon the loose and general sense in which everything implied by a term is said to be connoted by it. ”

“ When we predicate of any thing 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 Co-existence, or of Causation, or of Sequence, or of Resemblance.
It is impossible to imagine any proposition expressed in abstract terms, which can not 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. ”

“ A Concrete Term is the name of a substance, e.g. a man, this chair, the soul, God.
§ 97. Abstract terms are so called as being arrived at by a process of Abstraction. What is meant by Abstraction will be clear from a single instance. The mind, in contemplating a number of substances, may draw off, or abstract, its attention from all their other characteristics, and fix it only on some point, or points, which they have in common. ”

“ 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 name of an attribute as thought of by itself without reference to any individual or class possessing it, is called an Abstract name. By contradistinction, the name of an individual or a class is Concrete. ”

“ A more wanton alteration in the meaning of a word is rarely to be met with; for the expression general name, the exact equivalent of which exists in all languages I am acquainted with, was already available for the purpose to which abstract has been misappropriated, while the misappropriation leaves that important class of words, the names of attributes, without any compact distinctive appellation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hamilton and others use 'Extension' in the sense of Denotation, and 'Intension' or 'Comprehension' in the sense of Connotation. Now, terms may be classified, first according to what they stand for or denote; that is, according to their Denotation. In this respect, the use of a term is said to be either Concrete or Abstract.
A term is Concrete when it denotes a 'thing'; that is, any person, object, fact, event, feeling or imagination, considered as capable of having (or consisting of) qualities and a determinate existence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A practical test as to whether an abstract term, in any given case, is being used as a singular or common term, is to try whether the indefinite article or the sign of the plural can be attached to it. ”

“ We easily can imagine persons and things without their names, the sensorial image of them being more important than that other symbolic image, their name. Abstract conceptions, on the other hand, are only acquired by means of the words which alone serve to confer stability upon them. This is why verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and still more adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions are more intimately connected with our thinking than are substantives. ”

“ In consequence of this perversion of the word Being, philosophers looking about for something to supply its place, laid their hands upon the word Entity, a piece of barbarous Latin, invented by the schoolmen to be used as an abstract name, in which class its grammatical form would seem to place it: but being seized by logicians in distress to stop a leak in their terminology, it has ever since been used as a concrete name. ”

“ We rightly seek the meaning of the abstract in the concrete, because we cannot act in relation to the abstract, which is only a representative sign; we must give it a concrete form in order to make it a clear and distinct idea; until we have done so we do not know that we really believe—only believe that we believe it. ”

“ The kindred word essence, born at the same time and of the same parents, scarcely underwent a more complete transformation when, from being the abstract of the verb to be, it came to denote something sufficiently concrete to be inclosed in a glass bottle. The word Entity, since it settled down into a concrete name, has retained its universality of signification somewhat less impaired than any of the names before mentioned. Yet the same gradual decay to which, after a certain age, all the language of psychology seems liable, has been at work even here. ”

“ This being so, it is only a very small number of things, which are constantly obtruding themselves upon the mind, that have singular terms permanently set apart to denote them. Human beings, some domestic animals, and divisions of time and place, have proper names assigned to them in most languages, e.g. 'John,' 'Mary,' 'Grip,' 'January,' 'Easter,' 'Belgium,' 'Brussels,' 'the Thames,' 'Ben-Nevis.' Besides these, all abstract terms, when used without reference to lower notions, are of the nature of proper names, being permanently set apart to denote certain special attributes, e.g. ”

“ Hence it appears that the term by its very name indicates that it is arrived at by an analysis of the proposition. It is the judgement or proposition that is the true unit of thought and speech. The proposition as a whole is prior in conception to the terms which are its parts: but the parts must come before the whole in the synthetic order of treatment.
§ 60. A term is the same thing as a name or noun.
§ 61. A name is a word, or collection of words, which serves as a mark to recall or transmit the idea of a thing, either in itself or through some of its attributes. ”

“ Thus the abstraction is legitimate when you say or write: "A man wishes to acquire the comforts and luxuries, as well as the necessaries, of life." The concreteness is likewise legitimate when you say or write: "John Smith wishes to earn cake as well as bread and butter."
In most instances general terms are the same as abstract, and specific the same as concrete. Some subtle discriminations may, however, be made. ”

“ If in the first stages of language the concrete name cannot be separated in thought from the concrete object it belongs to, it is inferable that in the course of forming successively higher grades of abstract names, there will have to be resisted the tendency to interpret each more abstract name in terms of some one class of the less abstract names it covers. ”

“ If particular objects or qualities were single things, there would then be some precise limit between them and abstract or general ideas, but as the most particular object, or qualities, as well as the most general combinations and classes of things are necessarily confused and mixed results, and nothing more than a number of impressions, never distinctly analyzed by the mind, there can be no general reasoning to disprove abstracted ideas in the common sense of the word. ”

“ Whether a word is used as a concrete or abstract term is in most instances plain from the word itself, the use of most words being pretty regular one way or the other; but sometimes we must judge by the context. ”

“ Words are for them no more than a kind of vehicle, a social instrument of mutual comprehension. When a sequence of general or abstract terms passes through their minds, what really passes is a succession of concretes, save for the very abstract words which “evoke nothing.” ”

“ He surely had no conventional gestures for the causal and logical relations involved in his inductions about the moon, for example. So far as it goes, then, his narrative tends to discountenance the notion that no abstract thought is possible without words. Abstract thought of a decidedly subtle kind, both scientific and moral, went on here in advance of the means of expressing it to others. To a great extent it does so in all of us to-day, for nothing is commoner than to have a thought, and then to seek for the proper words in which to clothe its most important features. ”

“ In description in terms of abstract general notions such as common qualities we substitute for fact something which is not fact at all, we lose touch with the concrete and, moreover, we are strongly tempted to confuse fact with abstraction and believe that the implications of the abstraction apply to the fact, or even that the abstraction is itself a real part of the fact. ”

“ Many other prepositions offer in their constructions illustrations of isolation. Thus, e.g., the combination of any preposition with a noun without an article was exceedingly common in the older language, and we still possess a numerous collection of such combinations in almost daily use. Thus we find indeed, in fact, in truth, in reality, in jest, etc., a construction which perhaps may yet be considered a living one when the noun is an abstraction. ”

“ Nor would it be wise in a writer, on a subject involving so much of abstraction, to deny himself the advantage derived from even an improper use of a term, when, by means of it, some familiar association is called up which brings the meaning home to the mind, as it were by a flash. ”