Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/40

 felt to be entirely omitted throughout all the recent realistic controversies. I will press it further by two applications. First, we saw that the realist of to-day asserts the reality—even the physical reality—of universals. The modern treatment of Plato's Ideas, in this connection, is extraordinarily interesting, but not perhaps as new as it might appear. Now a universal is a working connection within particulars. Again we might use the phrase which to me appears so apt, and say it is the life of the particulars. It is, indeed, at bottom, of the nature of a conation. Now the objects of sensitive and perceptive acts are charged with such working connections, which are expressly and precisely connections of content and of nothing else in the world. No possible handling of contents ab extra by a mind made up of pure conations and directions will get out of them the determinate and peculiar result which their inherent nisus to the whole brings out, as, for instance, in any case of relative suggestion. I find myself indeed comparing our twentieth