Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/500

 486 W. B. BOYCE GIBSON : iug the same abstract kind of generality which is proper to the concepts from which it is abstracted : it is only fit to stand above them in a classificatory system. If adopted as an explanatory principle of the concepts from which it is abstracted it is set to achieve the impossible, for how can a explain a + b and a + c ? How can the abstract element common to elimination and elaboration, the element of lessening effort explain either the processes of elimination or of elaboration ? It is true that effort is lessened as in the formation of a habit both by the elimination of irrele- vant movements and the elaboration of the relevant, but it is equally lessened whatever be the irrelevancies eliminated or the nature of the elaboration provided the net result is the same. And this is the inevitable outcome of introducing into Psychology principles of an abstract, quantitative cast : these abstractedly derived principles of number and magni- tude cannot explain qualitative distinctions and purposive elaborations. It is emphatically true here that what is gained in generality is lost in explanatory power. The concrete universal, on the other hand, is the pure fact itself as reconstructed in the mind. It is a coherent mental structure. In forming it we start, not from abstract concepts, but from the fact itself, analyse the fact, eliminate what is unessential for our purpose and reconstruct the remaining elements into a complex coherent whole which is what we call the concrete universal a purified, purposive reconstruction of some aspect of real fact. The concrete universal, further, is that reconstructed conception of an actual fact which supplies a coherent context in the light of which the various elements of the analysed fact receive a certain fulness of meaning of which they are incapable when considered apart from that context. It is not neces- sarily the articulated thought -structure representing a realised ideal. At any stage of its growth the fact of mental process have represented, after the proper analyses and syntheses can be been gone through, as a concrete universal. 1 1 If we ask ourselves what is the animating principle that gives to the concrete universal such coherency as it may be capable of possessing, and having discovered it or one aspect of it abstract it in idea from the processes which it systematises, so that it stands apart abstracted from that which it unifies, we obtain what I should like to call, in opposition to the mere abstract universal already alluded to, the true abstract universal. The true abstract universal differs from its maimed and artificial counterpart (1) in its genesit, for it is only abstracted after the necessary analyses and syntheses have been made, whereas the mere abstract universal is derived not from a process of conceptual analysis