Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/226

 comes by that very isolation representative of a genus. Instead of regarding each genus as including actually a multiplicity of objects, it is now maintained, on the contrary, that each object involves potentially, and as so many qualities which it holds captive, a multiplicity of genera. But the question before us is whether individual qualities, even isolated by an effort of abstraction, do not remain individual; and whether, to make them into genera, a new effort of the mind is not required, by which it first bestows on each quality a name, and then collects under this name a multitude of individual objects. The whiteness of a lily is not the whiteness of a snow-field; they remain, even as isolated from the snow and the lily, snow-white or lily-white. They only forego their individuality if we consider their likeness in order to give them a common name; then, applying this name to an unlimited number of similar objects, we throw back upon the quality, by a sort of ricochet, the generality which the word went out to seek in its application to things. But, reasoning in this way, do we not return to the point of view of extension, which we just now abandoned? We are then, in truth, revolving in a circle, nominalism leading us to conceptualism, and conceptualism bringing us back to nominalism. Generalization can only be effected by extracting common qualities; but, that qualities should appear common, they must have already been subjected to a process of generalization.