Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/172

 I shall add one more passage out of the Essay on Human Understanding, which is as follows:—"Abstract ideas are not so obvious or easy to children, or the yet unexercised mind as particular ones. If they seem so to grown men, it is only by constant and familiar use they are made so. For when we nicely reflect upon them, we shall find that general ideas are fictions and contrivances of the mind, that carry difficulty with them, and do not so easily of themselves as we are apt to imagine. For example, does it not require some skill and pains to form the general idea of a triangle, (which is yet none of the abstract, comprehensive, and difficult), for it must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenor, but all and none of these at once. In effect it is something imperfect that cannot exist, an idea wherein some parts of different and inconsistent ideas are put together. 'Tis true the mind in this imperfect state has need of such ideas, and makes all the haste it can to them, for the convenience of communication and enlargement of knowledge, to both of which it is naturally very much inclined. But yet one has reason to suspect such ideas are marks of our imperfections, at least this is enough to show that the most abstract and general ideas are not those that the mind is first and most easily acquainted with, nor such as its earliest knowledge is conversant about.—After laughing at this description of the general idea of a triangle, which is neither oblique nor rectangle, equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenor, but all and none of these at once, Berkeley adds, much is here said of the difficulty that abstract ideas carry with them, and the pains and skill requisite to the forming of them. 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