Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/844

828 towards human betterment) presumably means all attributes which are common either to normal human beings or to human communities. To employ abstract terms of the above sorts is as though we should say apple-iety, to signify the far less abstruse, but still largely unknown, totality of predicates which belong to all apples, or this apple-iety to include the natural variety, shape, size, mass, markings, and life-history of a particular apple. It is, of course, much more natural to refer to this apple, understanding that it has various attributes of which we are aware and others into which we do not think it necessary to inquire. Thus it seems to me that an abstract term, pretending to signify the whole extension of any object or class, is really an a-logical term. It means the uniting of all the predicates properly applicable to some subject; of those which we do not at present know, and some of which we may never know, with those which we do know. This vague idea of the total nature of anything is properly concrete rather than abstract; a true abstract idea being one which dissociates some definite and either familiar or understandable quality or relation of things from the other qualities or relations of the same things.

2. Most concrete ideas refer to natural entities; these being material objects, each of which has some unity due to the association in space of its parts or members a unity contrasting with that of a 'universal,' which is constituted by the relation of likeness alone. Some entities are properly regarded as individuals, while others are systems of individuals, whose members are separated but able to produce effects in common, and yet others are parts of individual bodies, differentiated though not separated from their correlative wholes.

(a) Among other ideas which I should class as concrete rather than abstract are those of natural features which are neither material parts nor abstract qualities. They include perforations, cavities (e.g., rooms of a house), indentations and impressions of all sorts; shadows, and reflected images; also the surfaces, edges, and corners of bodies (e.g., of a common brick) as approximating roughly to geometrical surfaces, lines, and points.

(b) These last categories which, together with superficial and