Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/483

 482 S. H. HODGSON I blue generally, limited and defined by light or by dark, that is, by means of conscious comparison with other perceptions. And what is true of the data of perception in the stream of consciousness is true also of the things of nature, the objects of ordinary experience. The properties or attributes of a natural object, a piece of wood for instance, are combined with one another in an intimate union which is perceivable or imaginable ; the hardness, the dryness, the moisture, the woody fibre, the pores, the grain, the colour markings and so on, are conjoined one with another in away quite different from that which they take when enumerated and superposed one upon another in thought, as we have now been doing in conceiving and describing them. The attributes of a natural object as a percept have quite a different order and arrange- ment from what they have in the same object as a concept. Thus the order of real existence also is an order of perception and imagination, just as much as the stream of data is ; and this order is in both cases converted by conception or thought into a pile of generalisations artificially combined for purposes of investigation. In other words, the perceptual order of nature and of experience is modified and moulded by thought into a conceptual order and arrangement. We cannot think save by general determinations of perception, nor speak save by general words expressing them. It is thinking which first introduces these into the stream of consciousness, which draws the first distinction between general and individual, and which thereby enables us to see the fact that perception is always of the latter, though without always knowing it to be so. Even the term iniHridmd is a general term. When we say this individual, that is merely a case of difjito monstrare, as if in utter desperation of e-.i-pn-.^in/j him as an individual reality. Lastly be it noted, that this conceptualising or generalising process is a generalisation of consciousness, of conscious experience, itself. As of the parts, so also of the whole. Xo single general term, no complex of general terms mutually limiting and modifying each other, ever attains adequacy to the individual thing, person, feeling, or state of consciousness, to which it is applied. There is always a i/Kt/yiii, so to speak, in the conceptual or general term, which does not fit close to the intended individual, and which therefore may possibly apply as well to another individual, if any there be, similar to the former. We naturally and necessarily generalise our own consciousness in actual experience, and we never transcend our own individual consciousness, I mean of course the stream of data which is ours alone, in doing so. This would be an impossibility. That each of us is an individual con-