Specificity

“ Our very theory insists that your internal meanings, your ideas viewed as internally significant, your selections and expressions, are typical instances of facts, and of precisely the facts of whose unity the world consists. ”

“ All the secondary qualities, colours, sounds, tastes, smells, heat, hardness, everything, in short, which is an affection of sense, may be generalised at one sweep into our mere knowledge of things. But the primary qualities, which are usually restricted to extension and figure, and which constitute, it is said, the objective or real essence of things, and which are entirely independent of us, into what shall they be generalised? ”

“ What I say is that our present recognition of the concrete things in which we all believe is not a mere acceptance of any content of sense, but does include an intention to act, and does fulfil, as far as it goes, a purpose, and our own conscious purpose. ”

“ But how do we human beings get at what we call natural truth? By observation—so men say—and by experience. But by whose experience? By the united, by the synthesized, by the revised, corrected, rationally criticized, above all by the common, experience of many individuals. ”

“ Let me, for the purposes of this discussion, make a triple division of knowledge into physical, ethical, and æsthetical, according as our thought is concerned with the world of matter, the world of mind, and the world of art or beauty. ”

“ Connected with the distinction just made between ‘object’ in the sense of the qualities actually before the mind and ‘object’ in the sense of the whole thing which possesses the qualities actually before the mind, is another distinction of the utmost importance for a correct analysis of the constituents necessary to a valuable whole. ”

“ For, as we define a concrete name by enumerating the attributes which it connotes, and as the attributes connoted by a concrete name form the entire signification of the corresponding abstract one, the same enumeration will serve for the definition of both. Thus, if the definition of a human being be this, “a being, corporeal, animated, rational, and shaped so and so,” the definition of humanity will be, corporeity and animal life, combined with rationality, and with such and such a shape. ”

“ Hence it has been said,
By Hui Tzŭ. 'The objective emanates from the subjective; the subjective is consequent upon the objective. This is the Alternation Theory.' Nevertheless, when one is born, the other dies. ”

“ But when we speak of a man's habitual condition, we mean his constant and absolute completeness of mind or body, in some particular point—as for instance, his perception of virtue, or of some art, or else some science or other. ”

“ Our preference, however, for the objects of sense, for the pen, and the sun, as typical instances of objects of ideas, arises from the fact that in case of just these objects, it is especially easy, by observing, from without, the acts of the person who has these ideas, to form confident and, for common-sense purposes, relatively exact notions of the selection to which the internal meaning of the ideas has bound the maker of any given judgment about objects. ”

“ Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, [4] contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this [Pg 4] quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. ‘Consciousness’ is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known. ”

“ And since it is by these laws, combined with the facts of each particular case, that the whole of the phenomena of human action and feeling are produced, it is on these that every rational attempt to construct the science of human nature in the concrete, and for practical purposes, must proceed. ”

“ Now the sort of 'fact of experience' on which in my book I have proposed to compromise, is the so-called 'mental state,' in whose existence not only common men but philosophers have uniformly believed. ”

“ In those subjects which are at the same time familiar and complicated, and especially in those which are so in as great a degree as moral and social subjects are, it is a matter of common remark how many important propositions are believed and repeated from habit, while no account could be given, and no sense is practically manifested, of the truths which they convey. ”

“ The objective statement, however true, is no measure of subjective fact, but this twisting of subjective fact to correspond with objective order is so embedded in language and common thought that it will perhaps always remain the form of ordinary thinking, like common-sense realism and geocentric appearance. ”

“ Concrete Terms; General vs. Specific Terms>
Abstract terms convey ideas; concrete terms call up pictures. If we say "Honesty is the best policy," we speak abstractly. Nobody can see or hear or touch the thing honesty or the thing policy; the apprehension of them must be purely intellectual. But if we say "The rat began to gnaw the rope," we speak concretely. Rat, gnaw, and rope are tangible, perceptible things; the words bring to us visions of particular objects and actions. ”

“ Every concrete act of knowledge, in our conscious life, includes, then, a more or less deliberate abstraction from the background of recognized reality which we conceive as the world, for the sake of a clearer attention to certain special objects of our present acknowledgment. ”

“ My thesis is essentially this, that you cannot rationally conceive what human experience is, and means, except by regarding it as the fragment of an experience that is infinitely richer than ours, and that possesses a world-embracing unity and completeness of constitution. My argument for this thesis has been dependent on an assertion about the sense in which any opinion whatever can be either true or false, and upon a doctrine regarding that insight to which we appeal whenever we make any significant assertion. ”

“ Thus we may say that a word embodies a vague idea when its effects are appropriate to an individual, but are the same for various similar individuals, while a word embodies a general idea when its effects are different from those appropriate to individuals. ”

“ Of Ethology, Or The Science Of The Formation Of Character.
§ 1. The laws of mind as characterized in the preceding chapter, compose the universal or abstract portion of the philosophy of human nature; and all the truths of common experience, constituting a practical knowledge of mankind, must, to the extent to which they are truths, be results or consequences of these. ”

“ The World of Description, as a conceived objective order, is the result of our attempting, through a process of serial discrimination, to make good the second of these aspects of our ignorance. The World of Appreciation we learn to recognize by coming to a better definition of what it is that our will even now seeks. ”

“ Then if we give a rigorous and exact meaning to the expressions, “We and what is before us,” “We and the objects,” “We and the World,” we have a correct classification of all thinkable reality differentiated into 94 persons and things, but with the understanding that all persons are in reality one Person. ”

“ Here also we should immediately find ourselves in a world of relations between subject and object, of a regularly arranged abundance of subjective and objective qualities, states and processes, of which the objective only come to our knowledge through the medium of the subjective, and of regularly arranged laws to which both the subjective and the objective are commonly subordinate. ”

“ In short, this postulate is among the inspired revelations of the Common Sense that are contained in our share of Divine Reason. We may speak of understanding as 'human,' with its often discordant generalisations; but there can be no merely 'human' Reason. ”

“ Now in this extremely elementary consideration, namely, in the consideration that unless ideas first voluntarily bind themselves to a given task, and so, by their internal purpose, already commit themselves to a certain selection of its object, they are neither true nor false, — in this consideration, I say, there may be hidden consequences that we shall later find momentous for the whole theory of Being and of truth. ”

“ The qualities being all that interests us in things, and the notion of an indeterminate substratum contradictory, we ought, it is argued, to identify the thing and the series of its states and qualities without more ado. ”

“ Yes, it would be to know what the whole individual Being called the World is; and who the Individual of Individuals, namely the Absolute, or God himself, is. Just such final determinateness, just such precision, definiteness, finality of meaning, constitutes that limit of your own internal meaning which our theory will hereafter seek to characterize. ”

“ No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon. Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting it either in revelation, the consensus gentium, the instincts of the heart, or the systematized experience of the race. ”

“ Many passages might be adduced which would illustrate the soundest principles of intellectual and technical criticism, and peculiarly exemplify those primary laws in the philosophy of human nature, association and generalization. ”

“ What classes of things have a greater share of pure existence, in your judgment—those of which food and drink and condiments and all kinds of sustenance are examples, or the class which contains true opinion and knowledge and mind and all the different kinds of virtue? ”

“ At bottom the process is one of conception, and is everywhere, even in the sphere of simple sensible qualities, the same as that by which we are usually understood to attain to the notions of abstract goodness, perfect felicity, absolute power, and the like: the direct perception of a difference between compounds, and the imaginary prolongation of the direction of the difference to an ideal terminus, the notion of which we fix and keep as one of our permanent subjects of discourse. ”

“ The subjective perception is made objective, viz., is assigned time and place in the outer world and given a name. The investigation of the processes by which this objectivication is performed is a function of philosophy. ”

“ These two aims, the one abstract and universal, the other concrete and individual, can always be combined, just as in every human countenance are combined a type, which is universal, and a character, which is individual. ”

“ The object which fulfils this definition, and which is therefore worthy to be called real, is of necessity in itself One and only One; since variety, when consciously faced, calls forth thought, and arouses demands for characterization and explanation. ”

“ Having established the worth of the principles of consciousness, of evidence, and of contradiction, in relation to the dignity of fundamental, we will now examine the intrinsic value of the different criteria. ”

“ That is to say, we shall be increasing the individuality of the objects known, by the operation of true thought and observation in the discovery of new characters or qualities in them; we shall be increasing by the same act the generality of the objects known, by the discovery of new relations, new genera under which to bring them. ”

“ Moreover, our features are constantly varying; and if our moral and intellectual faculties are to be inferred from these changes, how are we to establish or follow up any fixed principle, amid such a labyrinth of confusion? ”

“ The common quality of all states of mind would be the quality designated by the word "mental"; and besides this we should have to suppose that each separate person's states of mind have some common characteristic distinguishing them from the states of mind of other people. ”

“ The fact is that the view which seems to me to be true is the one which, apart from theories, I think every one would naturally take, namely, that there are an immense variety of different things, all of which are intrinsically good ”

“ Since the specific essence is conceived as the most fundamental reality in the thing, and as the seat and source of all the properties and activities of the thing, it is sometimes defined or described, in accordance with this notion of it, as the primary constitutive of the thing and the source of all the properties of the thing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These are the physical and the mental, or, as they are sometimes called, the moral sciences. The proper subjects of the first are the properties of matter; those of the second are the sensations, faculties, and habits of the human mind. ”

“ A term thus frequently used of necessity will express at various times and in different connections different shades of thought. To discover the substance that lies behind this varying usage and is common to it all is no small task. ”