Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/168

 154 F. H. BRADLEY : Now I might ask if mere fancy may not be itself highly- abstract, but, passing this by, I will go on to a plainer objection. To maintain all thought to be abstract is to- be brought into collision with evident facts. For the lower animals surely can reason while they hardly are able to think abstractly, except in certain theories. And in our own lives the field covered by what is called intuitive under- standing is certainly not all abstract or again on the other side devoid of judgment and inference. An obvious instance is the thinking and judging about spatial arrangements in an individual case. And the writer who will assert that such conclusions as He is the guilty man, or That is. the right way, are either all abstract or are else not acts of thought, is to my mind past argument. 1 Inference of course is always abstract if that means that it implies, analysis and selection, and involves always a principle of necessity which can, or could conceivably, be abstracted. But in any other sense judgment and inference need cer- tainly not be abstract, but may be concrete to an indefinite extent. In short, to set up imagination and thought as two- separate faculties, and to speak of one using the other or again being applied to its service, is from first to last erroneous and indefensible. Imagination, if of a certain kind, is not something employed by thought, but is itself thinking proper. If, on the other hand, by mere imagination we mean our mental flow so far as that is subjected to no control what- ever, and is so not "used" at all, this certainly is not, imagination in the higher sense of the word. Mere imagina- tion, where regulated logically, itself is inference. And again,, so far as serving other ends and subjected to other kinds of control, it becomes and itself is contrivance, fancy and crea- and, if so, how we can be jiistified in using it. If Prof. Sully's view is that between thought and mere imagination there is in principle really no- difference at all, that the distinction drawn between them is merely an affair of language and convenience, and depends, perhaps usually though certainly not always, on degree of concreteness, that is a doctrine which, however unsatisfactory, would be intelligible. But such a doctrine hardly entitles any one who holds it to speak of these processes as if they really were two, to lay down a ground and principle of distinction, and to go on to speak of " a connexion between the two" (p. 381). Such a position seems quite inconsistent and indefensible, though I fear it is not un- common. 1 1 am tempted to say this again of any one who can maintain that thought must depend upon language. There arises here, of course, the further question, how far thinking, which is not throughout dependent on language, and which is in this sense intuitional, can be genuinely abstract. This is an interesting and important question, but we are not concerned with it here.