Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/173

 are conversant about abstract ideas. From all which the natural consequences should seem to be, that so difficult a thing as forming abstract ideas was not necessary for communication, which is so familiar to all sorts of men. But, we are told, if they seem obvious and easy to grown men, it is only because by constant and familiar use they are made so. Now I would fain know at what time it is, men are employed in surmounting that difficulty and furnishing themselves with those necessary helps for discourse. It cannot be when they are grown up, for then it seems they are not conscious of any such pains-taking; it therefore remains to be the business of their childhood. And surely the great and multiplied labour of framing abstract notions will be found a hard task for that tender age. Is it not a hard thing to imagine that a couple of children cannot prate of their sugar plums, and rattles, and the rest of their little trinkets, till they have first packed together numberless inconsistencies, and so framed in their minds general abstract ideas, and annexed them to every common name they make use of.

It is I know a point much insisted on that all knowledge and demonstration are about universal notions, to which I fully assent. But then it does not appear to me that those notions are formed by abstraction, in the manner premised; universality, so far as I can comprehend, not consisting in the absolute, positive nature and conception of any thing, but in the relation it bears to the particulars signified, or represented by it. But here it will be demanded, how we can know any proposition to be true of all particular triangles, except we have seen it first demonstrated of the abstract idea of a triangle which equally agrees to all?

For because a property may be demonstrated to agree to some particular triangle, it will not thence follow that it