Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/164

 148 L. T. HOBHOUSE : mentioned which naturally offer themselves as starting-points for a theory of the concept. There is (a) first and foremost the ' common ' quality which is the centre of the whole matter. For the abstraction theory in its crudest form it is enough to identify the content of the concept with the common quality as such. It is not ' men ' but ' man ' that forms its content. This theory, we should observe, works much better in some cases than in others. It does not seem difficult, for instance, to form a general idea of whiteness from which the differences in substance or shape of actual white objects are simply dropped. Nor is it hard to think of motion or pressure in a definite direction without special reference to other characteristics of the body which is moving or pressing. I do not insist that we can form abstract ideas without some irrelevant imagery. I mean only that in such cases the irrelevance is so clear that we have no doubt about it. We know exactly what we mean by ' white ' or ' heavy,' and we have no temptation to confound them with other attributes of things. If there is still no ' leaving out ' there is at least an adequate ' singling out '. But in other cases we seem to be much less successful. Theoretically curves of the second degree are in exactly the same posi- tion as white objects. They all agree in certain points and differ in others. A cabbage and a whale, again, agree in being organisms while they differ in other respects. But when the abstraction theory is pressed on these instances it begins to have the air of a fiction. To this theory a content is nothing if not definite, and the demand for a fixed and unchanging conception in these cases begins to put too great a strain on our intelligence. There seems at first to be a resource in the enumeration of elements. Whales and cabbages are both composed of cellular tissue, both as- similate nourishment, reproduce their species, and so on. But ' this is the by-path on which the Abstraction wanders from the path of the concept and abandons Actuality'. 1 These elements however carefully enumerated are not adequate to the idea of organism and leave us unsatisfied. And apart from them it seems impossible to fix the con- ception as something identical in all cases. The common element will not stand out from the differences as clearly as in the first instances. We shall return to this point later on. But we note mean- while a more general objection to our present account. In the common content taken merely as a content the element of 1 Hegel, " Wissenschaft der Logik," Werke, v., p. 59.