CONCEPTION.
=Different states of mind can mean the same.= The function by which we
mark off, discriminate, draw a line round, and identify a numerically
distinct subject of discourse is called _conception_. It is plain that
whenever one and the same mental state thinks of many things, it must be
the vehicle of many conceptions. If it has such a multiple conceptual
function, it may be called a state of compound conception.
We may conceive realities supposed to be extra-mental, as steam-engine;
fictions, as mermaid; or mere _entia rationis_, like difference or
nonentity. But whatever we do conceive, our conception is of that and
nothing else--nothing else, that is, _instead_ of that, though it may be
of much else _in addition_ to that. Each act of conception results from
our attention's having singled out some one part of the mass of
matter-for-thought which the world presents, and from our holding fast
to it, without confusion. Confusion occurs when we do not know whether a
certain object proposed to us is _the same_ with one of our meanings or
not; so that the conceptual function requires, to be complete, that the
thought should not only say 'I mean this,' but also say 'I don't mean
that.'
Each conception thus eternally remains what it is, and never can become
another. The mind may change its states, and its meanings, at different
times; may drop one conception and take up another: but the dropped
conception itself can in no intelligible sense be said to _change into_
its successor. The paper, a moment ago white, I may now see to be
scorched black. But my _conception_ 'white' does not change into my
_conception_ 'black.' On the contrary, it stays alongside of the
objective blackness, as a different meaning in my mind, and by so doing
lets me judge the blackness as the paper's change. Unless it stayed, I
should simply say 'blackness' and know no more. Thus, amid the flux of
opinions and of physical things, the world of conceptions, or things
intended to be thought about, stands stiff and immutable, like Plato's
Realm of Ideas.
Some conceptions are of things, some of events, some of qualities. Any
fact, be it thing, event, or quality, may be conceived sufficiently for
purposes of identification, if only it be singled out and marked so as
to separate it from other things. Simply calling it 'this' or 'that'
will suffice. To speak in technical language, a subject may be conceived
by its _denotation_, with no _connotation_, or a very minimum of
connotation, attached. The essential point is that it should be
re-identified by us as that which the talk is about; and no full
representation of it is necessary for this, even when it is a fully
representable thing.
In this sense, creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may
have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the
same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a
feeling of 'Hollo! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
This sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of our
consciousness. The same matters can be thought of in different states of
mind, and some of these states can know that they mean the same matters
which the other states meant. In other words, _the mind can always
intend, and know when it intends, to think the Same_.
=Conceptions of Abstract, of Universal, and of Problematic Objects.=--The
sense of our meaning is an entirely peculiar element of the thought. It
is one of those evanescent and 'transitive' facts of mind which
introspection cannot turn round upon, and isolate and hold up for
examination, as an entomologist passes round an insect on a pin. In the
(somewhat clumsy) terminology I have used, it has to do with the
'fringe' of the object, and is a 'feeling of tendency,' whose neural
counterpart is undoubtedly a lot of dawning and dying processes too
faint and complex to be traced. (See p. 169.) The geometer, with his one
definite figure before him, knows perfectly that his thoughts apply to
countless other figures as well, and that although he _sees_ lines of a
certain special bigness, direction, color, etc., he _means_ not one of
these details. When I use the word _man_ in two different sentences, I
may have both times exactly the same sound upon my lips and the same
picture in my mental eye, but I may mean, and at the very moment of
uttering the word and imagining the picture know that I mean, two
entirely different things. Thus when I say: "What a wonderful man Jones
is!" I am perfectly aware that I mean by man to exclude Napoleon
Bonaparte or Smith. But when I say: "What a wonderful thing Man is!" I
am equally well aware that I mean no such exclusion. This added
consciousness is an absolutely positive sort of feeling, transforming
what would otherwise be mere noise or vision into something
_understood_; and determining the sequel of my thinking, the later words
and images, in a perfectly definite way.
No matter how definite and concrete the habitual imagery of a given mind
may be, the things represented appear always surrounded by their fringe
of relations, and this is as integral a part of the mind's object as the
things themselves are. We come, by steps with which everyone is
sufficiently familiar, to think of whole classes of things as well as of
single specimens; and to think of the special qualities or attributes of
things as well as of the complete things--in other words, we come to
have _universals_ and _abstracts_, as the logicians call them, for our
objects. We also come to think of objects which are only _problematic_,
or not yet definitely representable, as well as of objects imagined in
all their details. An object which is problematic is defined by its
relations only. We think of a thing _about_ which certain facts must
obtain. But we do not yet know how the thing will look when
realized--that is, although conceiving it we cannot _imagine_ it. We
have in the relations, however, enough to individualize our topic and
distinguish it from all the other meanings of our mind. Thus, for
example, we may conceive of a perpetual-motion machine. Such a machine
is a _quæsitum_ of a perfectly definite kind,--we can always tell
whether the actual machines offered us do or do not agree with what we
mean by it. The natural possibility or impossibility of the thing never
touches the question of its conceivability in this problematic way.
'Round-square,' again, or 'black-white-thing,' are absolutely definite
conceptions; it is a mere accident, as far as conception goes, that they
happen to stand for things which nature never shows us, and of which we
consequently can make no picture.
The nominalists and conceptualists carry on a great quarrel over the
question whether "the mind can frame abstract or universal ideas."
Ideas, it should be said, of abstract or universal objects. But truly in
comparison with the wonderful fact that our thoughts, however different
otherwise, can still be of _the same_, the question whether that same be
a single thing, a whole class of things, an abstract quality or
something unimaginable, is an insignificant matter of detail. Our
meanings are of singulars, particulars, indefinites, problematics, and
universals, mixed together in every way. A singular individual is as
much _conceived_ when he is isolated and identified away from the rest
of the world in my mind, as is the most rarefied and universally
applicable quality he may possess--_being_, for example, when treated in
the same way. From every point of view, the overwhelming and portentous
character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from
Socrates downwards, philosophers should have vied with each other in
scorn of the knowledge of the particular, and in adoration of that of
the general, is hard to understand, seeing that the more adorable
knowledge ought to be that of the more adorable things, and that the
_things_ of worth are all concretes and singulars. The only value of
universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning, to know new
truths about individual things. The restriction of one's meaning,
moreover, to an individual thing, probably requires even more
complicated brain-processes than its extension to all the instances of a
kind; and the mere mystery, as such, of the knowledge, is equally great,
whether generals or singulars be the things known. In sum, therefore,
the traditional Universal-worship can only be called a bit of perverse
sentimentalism, a philosophic 'idol of the cave.'
=Nothing can be conceived as the same without being conceived in a novel
state of mind.= It seems hardly necessary to add this, after what was
said on p. 156. Thus, my arm-chair is one of the things of which I have
a conception; I knew it yesterday and recognized it when I looked at it.
But if I think of it to-day as the same arm-chair which I looked at
yesterday, it is obvious that the very conception of it _as_ the same is
an additional complication to the thought, whose inward constitution
must alter in consequence. In short, it is logically impossible that the
same thing should be _known as the same_ by two successive copies of the
same thought. As a matter of fact, the thoughts by which we know that we
mean the same thing are apt to be very different indeed from each other.
We think the thing now substantively, now transitively; now in a direct
image, now in one symbol, and now in another symbol; but nevertheless we
somehow always _do_ know which of all possible subjects we have in mind.
Introspective psychology must here throw up the sponge; the fluctuations
of subjective life are too exquisite to be described by its coarse
terms. It must confine itself to bearing witness to the fact that all
sorts of different subjective states do form the vehicle by which the
same is known; and it must contradict the opposite view.