Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/213

RhPROP. VI.———— more to reason than to authority. They accordingly surrendered universals considered as independent entities; and now, inasmuch as the old sources of our universal cognitions were thus extinguished with the extinction of the realities from which they had been supposed to proceed, these philosophers, in order to account for them, were thrown upon a new hypothesis, which was this: they held that all existences are particular, and also, that all our knowledge is, in the first instance, particular; that we start from particular cognitions; but that the mind, by a process of abstraction and generalisation, which consists in attending to the resemblances of things, leaving out of view their differences, subsequently constructs conceptions, or general notions, or universal cognition; which, however, are mere entia rationis, and have no existence out of the intelligence which fabricates them. These genera and species were held to have an ideal, though not a real, existence, and to be the objects which the mind contemplates when it employs such words as man, tree, or triangle. This doctrine is called Conceptualism.

27. The question very soon arose, Have these universal cognitions or general conceptions any existence even within the intelligence which is said to fabricate them? It is obvious that there is no object in nature corresponding to the genus animal,