Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/184

 ON ' ASSOCIATION '-CONTEOVEESIES. 171 and, next, a more particular unfolding of the consequences of being 'connected' or 'cohering'. It is as if a chemist should say of combustion, that a red hot coal tends to become connected with the oxygen of the atmosphere. Mr. Bradley 's view of what rises up to the mind under Association is the embodiment of his Philosophy of the Keal. It is, that particulars can never be associated, and that what is reproduced is universal. Now with his view of particula- rity (which is not shared in by anybody else that I know), this must be the case. A particular experience is the expe- rience of one moment of time, and cannot be repeated in fact ; for the 6th day of the month can never be the 5th. I quite agree with him that, in his sense, a single instance as such cannot be retained by the human intelligence. I further agree with him that seldom at any stage can a fact be retained without something that we may call mutilation, but the precise mutilation is a matter for inquiry. It may be a mutilation that gives generality or, if you prefer it, univer- sality, but it may not operate in that way. In common parlance, we should say that our knowledge of a concrete thing is improved by repetition, and attains its very best when we have viewed it times without number, so as to detach the picture from special dates and circumstances. This is the particularity of all our familiar surroundings ; it does not make the objects general in any received sense of the word ; they are still looked upon by us as particulars, and when we conceive them in idea, we do so with all the more vividness from the iteration and the absence of refer- ence to special moments of observation. Thus we seem to sacrifice an important distinction through Mr. Bradley's use of the words ' particular' and 'universal'. My memory or idea of a particular event contains the refer- ence to the date or moment of occurrence, and to all the sur- roundings of the actual experience. The idea must still be shorn and mutilated ; it cannot bring me back to the reality, and it must incur all the loss of imperfect mental cohesion. But it, nevertheless, presents itself as the image or residuum of a real event marked off by date and circum- stances from every other event, and thus rendered individual. To call such a resuscitation ' universal ' is a new employ- ment of the word, and would lead to very inconvenient re- sults. I take two examples to show how the term is com- monly understood in science. One is ' universal gravitation,' where the meaning is the highest attainable generalisation of a natural power, the last of a succession of gradually ascend- ing generalities. When we have generalised one step after