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Rh, terms with which your logical studies must have rendered you more or less familiar. Now, these terms, according to the meaning which we attach to them, are either very misleading, or they throw much light on the subject, viz., the nature of thought, which we are at present considering. These expressions, as usually understood, are held to express merely one of the modes in which thought manifests itself, its other mode of manifestation being its apprehension of particular things or singulars. Having apprehended these, in the first instance, thought is then supposed to fabricate classes or general conceptions, or universals, by means of abstraction and generalisation, that is, by separating the qualities which things have in common from the peculiar or differential qualities which they have, and by giving names to these common qualities, which names (names such as man, animal, and so forth) are significant of the classes to which the things belong. That doctrine I regard as exceedingly misleading. It is the doctrine taught in all our logics and psychologies. But I regard it, nevertheless, as erroneous in the extreme; erroneous for this reason, that it deceives us as to what thought is in itself, blinds us as to its true nature.

16. It seems to me that thought begins absolutely with classes, general conceptions, or universals, and that it cannot begin otherwise. Thinking is, in its very essence, the apprehension of something more