Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/588

 576 SCOTUS NOVANTICUS'S METAPHYSICA NOVA ET VETUSTA. negative affirmations, that it is not B nor anything else, on the presumption of course that it is either A or something else. Thus the initial movement of Eeason in Percipience may receive the general name of the 'Form or Law of Mediation,' inasmuch as we attain to the act -of simple apprehension, A = A, only by means of a middle. It does not affect this fact that the middle is a negation" (pp. 80-1). The author endeavours to prove that fundamentally the same process of thought "per- ception of the truth of one tiling through the perception of the truth of another" is exemplified in all Comparison, in Abstrac- tion and Generalisation, in Deductive Syllogism, and in In- ductive Eeasoning. And he concludes, therefore, that Eeason, as such, involves necessity. "The primary and perpetual form in which it moves, involves a ' must ' in its conclusion. It cannot not be that A, since it is not B nor anything else, is A. ... So that not only the first factor, Will or Potency, but also the second factor, Mediation, rebuts Sensationalism the former by its mere existence, the second by its character of necessity " (p. 83). The Third Part of the book, of which this is the conclusion, contains a careful and acute account of the nature and formation of general and abstract terms. The object of perception, at first viewed simply as a whole, is gradually transformed into a unity of qualities. The unity is here called the individual or sense-concept. It consists of course of a general, or potentially common, attribution, though it is not at first perceived as a common. The growth of the perception of similarity in difference is the growth of the common or general as such. " The force of Will is such that it can affirm a quality, and at the same time affirm or sub-affirm plurality of that quality, by a rapid repetition in thought of the objects in which that common quality has been perceived." What follows on the old subject of " abstract ideas " is well put: "The separate entity of such an abstract-percept becomes more prominent to thought as the number of objects of which it is predicable increases. The consciousness becomes confused with the multitude of individuals, and thus, by very contrast, the one separated percept which is being affirmed as a common or general is more distinctly thrown into relief, and stands forth as if truly itself an entity." As for the full-fledged "abstract-concept" the "cow which is no cow, and yet every cow " when we use such a term, we are speaking of a "know- ledge, not of a thing an ideal, not a real". We are dealing with " a ghostly entity ". Particular cows of sense suggest them- selves, it is true, "but the sense- suggestion obtrudes itself (like sense-suggestions in the moral sphere) only to be denied and to be excluded from the sphere of the knowledge in question which is a knowledge based on an act of Will". This psychological excursus, while not pretending to originality, is soundly and carefully thought out ; but it does not seem to stand in any very special connexion with the main thesis of the book.