Type (philosophy)

“ Each type-life is perfect, but those who are born through the type-life begin at the bottom; the “fall” is great from the type-life to the beginning of growth in the next higher kingdom. But from that onward the battle of evolution is to secure likeness to the type. ”

“ Nature herself never offers the general without the individual, nor the individual without the general. Every figure is composed of individual traits which distinguish it from all others, and make its own looks, and, at the same time, it has general traits which{158} constitute what is called the human figure. These general traits are the constitutive lineaments, and this figure is the type, that are given to the pupil that is beginning in the art of design to trace. ”

“ Human life, as represented in literature, consists of two main branches, character and action. Of these, character, which is the realm of personality, is generalized by means of type, which is ideal character; action, which is the realm of experience, by plot, which is ideal action. It is convenient to examine the nature of these separately. A type, the example of a class, contains the characteristic qualities which make an individual one of that class ”

“ Is it a wonder that beings of one physiological type have one type of world, and does the present uniform common world prove more than that we human beings are of one type? Does it in the least prove that our responses to stimuli are the right responses, i.e., rightly represent the object? ”

“ There are three classes of human beings,—or so I am apt to divide them in my "philosophy,"—the good, and in different degrees, sensible; the crafty; and the simple and weak, neither positively good or bad. ”

“ While the ideal type is adhered to, and a morphological unity may be proved, yet there is an orderly and beautiful gradation, in which each form becomes more complicated than the form which precedes it. ”

“ All those variations of feature constituting what we call "expression," represent departures from a perfect type just in proportion as they represent what is termed "character;"—and they are, or ought to be, more or less disagreeable or painful because "the aspects which please us are the outward correlatives of inward perfections, and the aspects which displease us are the outward correlatives of inward imperfections." ”

“ But if I say "Man is mortal," I am thinking, not of any particular man, but of the class of men in general. Such an idea is called a general idea, or a concept. All class-names, such as man, tree, house, river, animal, horse, being, which stand, not for one thing, but for a multitude of things, represent concepts. We form these general ideas by including in them all the qualities which the whole class of objects has in common, and excluding from them all the qualities in which they differ, that is to say, the qualities which some of the objects possess, but others do not. ”

“ Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than we know ourselves. ”

“ They are real generalisations, because they include the whole of the material under consideration. The blur of their outlines, which is never great in truly generic composites, except in unimportant details, measures the tendency of individuals to deviate from the central type. ”

“ In order to recognize this identity, or, in other words, this exact similarity of quality, the assumption of a type-species is indispensable. We must consider as the type of the class, that among the Kinds included in it, which exhibits the properties constitutive of the class, in the highest degree; conceiving the other varieties as instances of degeneracy, as it were, from that type; deviations from it by inferior intensity of the characteristic property or properties. For every phenomenon is best studied (cæteris paribus) where it exists in the greatest intensity. ”

“ They refer to Being, — a Being of the third type, — and, when universal, they assert, about a realm of definite or relatively determinate, although still universal validity, or possibility, something that proves to be primarily negative, so far as its relation to its external object is concerned. They accomplish their assertions by means of the very fact that they undertake to exclude from the realm of externally valid Being, certain ideal combinations that, in the first place, would have seemed abstractly possible, if one had not scrutinized one’s ideas more closely. ”

“ Universals of this sort may be called "sensible qualities." They can be apprehended with less effort of abstraction than any others, and they seem less removed from particulars than other universals are. ”

“ In actuality there is, from the very beginning onward, nothing but just these individually limited and definite qualities, from which only we, by our comparative thinking, subsequently form the abstraction of a universal, unmoulded ‘Quality.’ And it is precisely the aforesaid limited qualities that are the things themselves. ”

“ It seems reasonable to me—upon the hypothesis that it is a person using another's mind or brain—that there must be more or less of that other's style or tone incorporated in the message, and that to the unseen personality, i.e., the power which impresses, the thought, the fact, or the philosophy, and not the style or tone, belongs. ”

“ In the state of differentiation to which superior and cultivated human species have attained, each individual forms surely a separate variety determined by what is called, abstractly, "the character." ”

“ We can therefore merely form the general notion of ‘quality’ in such a way as to lead us to seek further for the universal factor of all sensible qualities. Now since the classes of these qualities are altogether disparate,—warm and sweet, for example, having no common element in their content,—such universal factor lies solely in the form which our representation gives to them all. ”

“ For this problem of the categories, in all its abstractness, is still a common problem for all of us. Do you ask, however, what such researches can do to furnish more special aid to the workers in metaphysics, in the philosophy of religion, in ethics, or in æsthetics, beyond merely helping towards the formulation of a table of categories—then I reply that we are already not without evidence that such general researches, abstract though they may seem, are bearing fruits which have much more than a merely special interest. ”

“ If then all the primitive qualities which are known to us can be united in one and the same being, we should only acknowledge one substance; but if there are qualities which are mutually exclusive, there are as many different substances as there are such exclusions. ”

“ The form includes all the qualities of the thing. The matter is what has the qualities. For the qualities are all universals. A piece of gold is yellow, and this means simply that it has this in common with other pieces of gold, and other yellow objects. To say that anything has a quality is immediately to place it in a class. And what the class has in common is a universal. A thing without qualities cannot exist, nor qualities without a thing. And this is the same as saying that form and matter cannot exist separately. ”

“ But it is important to observe that the very qualities, which differentiate one beautiful object from all others, are, if the object be truly beautiful, as essential to its beauty, as those which it has in common with ever so many others. The object would no more have the beauty it has, without its specific qualities, than without those that are generic; and the generic qualities, by themselves, would fail, as completely, to give beauty, as those which are specific. ”

“ But the spatial or primary qualities of a thing, although they may seem more permanent and more essential to the reality of the thing than the secondary qualities, are nevertheless only qualities. They are not the thing itself, but ways in which it affects us. It seems to us that these qualities must inhere in or belong to the thing, and so we try to form the idea of the real thing as a substance or substratum which has the qualities. ”

“ But when we get to 'thing' we have reached a limit. The Summum Genus, or highest class under which all things fall, cannot be defined any more than a simple attribute; and for the very good reason that it connotes nothing but pure being, which is the simplest of all attributes. To say that a thing is an 'object of thought' is not really to define it, but to explain its etymology, and to reclaim a philosophical term from its abuse by popular language, in which it is limited to the concrete and the lifeless. ”

“ Note here, that it is by no means intended to imply that there may not be different Kinds, or logical species, of man. The various races and temperaments, the two sexes, and even the various ages, may be differences of kind, within our meaning of the term. ”

“ Types are beings. They breathe, palpitate, their steps are heard on the floor, they exist. They exist with an existence more intense than that of any creature thinking himself living there in the street. ”

“ In the first place, it is evident that a type is material and external, and the fulfilment of the type is spiritual and internal; what the type reveals to the bodily eye, its fulfilment must reveal to the eye of faith alone, or it is not really a fulfilment. ”

“ Our type is a prediction in persons rather than in things. But the use of the term is justified as including the most essential point: that “a type is an enacted prophecy, a kind of prophecy by action.” These personal types are the most real and significant; they have no mere arbitrary or conventional relation to their antitype. The enacted prophecy is the beginning of its own fulfilment, the first-fruits of the greater harvest that is to be. The better moments of the man who is hungering and thirsting after righteousness are a type, a promise, and prophecy of his future satisfaction. ”

“ In other words, mankind have not one universal character, but there exist universal laws of the Formation of Character. 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 truth is, that the difference between a limited and imperfect attribute of character and one that is boundless—power, for example—is more than a difference of degree. It is a difference in kind; for while in both cases we conceive of a personal capacity to act and a will to guide the act, in the one case we are thinking of that which is inferior, limited, and feeble, and in the other case we are thinking of that which knows no limitations and is absolutely inexhaustible. ”

“ Or suppose, again, that the character is known, and the environment the same as others of which we have had experience, yet even here the question arises, Are you able to generalize laws of the action and reaction of character and circumstances, when character does not mean disposition or temperament (the man is more than these) ? If you can not class characters, so as to deduce particulars from them, then even the premises we have supposed you to possess are useless to you. ”

“ But perhaps the variety is not so great as it seems. Is it not possible that we are abusing terms when we class as individualistic certain theories which superficially proclaim the preëminence of the individual? ”

“ And here we lose even that vestige of a meaning grounded in the nature of the things themselves, which may be supposed to be attached to the word essence when it is said that genus and species must be of the essence of the thing. There can be no doubt that when the schoolmen talked of the essences of things as opposed to their accidents, they had confusedly in view the distinction between differences of kind, and the differences which are not of kind; they meant to intimate that genera and species must be Kinds. ”

“ That is to say, unless we have reason to assert a generalisation—the generalisation that objects of a certain kind are generally made by men, we have no reason to suppose that these particular objects, which are of the kind in question, were made by men. ”

“ But when we are studying objects not for any special practical end, but for the sake of extending our knowledge of the whole of their properties and relations, we must consider as the most important attributes those which contribute most, either by themselves or by their effects, to render the things like one another, and unlike other things; which give to the class composed of them the most marked individuality ”

“ And as there is one general form, which, as I have said, belongs to the human kind at large, so in each of these classes there is one common idea which is the abstract of the various individual forms belonging to that class. ”

“ The type has been made according to the truth, and the truth has been recognised according to the type. ”

“ Now, by taking note in thought of this supposed uniqueness, you can, of course, in general, define, as a sort of problem to be solved by real Beings, the ideal and abstract nature of individuality itself. But then, you do not, in that case, tell what constitutes any one individual such as he is. ”

“ Characteristics of every extreme of diversity meet together here, and the task of adequate classification is beset with difficulty. We will restrict ourselves to pointing out a few of the most general character. ”

“ The features of any object that we contemplate may with intelligent judgment be divided into two classes, according as they are inherently essential, or else merely contributory, to the existence of that object as an individual entity. ”

“ Much as philosophic ingenuity may do in the way of inventing defences against the application of the principle of causation to human action, the deeper our analysis of the controversy, the more clearly is it seen that we are dealing with an attenuated form of that primitive animism which once characterised all human thinking. The persistence of types is a phenomenon that occurs as frequently in the world of mind as it does in the world of biology. ”