Abstract concepts, such as elasticity, voluminousness, disconnectedness,
are salient aspects of our concrete experiences which we find it useful
to single out. Useful, because we are then reminded of other things
that offer those same aspects; and, if the aspects carry consequences in
those other things, we can return to our first things, expecting those
same consequences to accrue.
To be helped to anticipate consequences is always a gain, and such being
the help that abstract concepts give us, it is obvious that their use is
fulfilled only when we get back again into concrete particulars by their
means, bearing the consequences in our minds, and enriching our notion
of the original objects therewithal.
Without abstract concepts to handle our perceptual particulars by,
we are like men hopping on one foot. Using concepts along with the
particulars, we become bipedal. We throw our concept forward, get
a foothold on the consequence, hitch our line to this, and draw our
percept up, travelling thus with a hop, skip and jump over the surface
of life at a vastly rapider rate than if we merely waded through the
thickness of the particulars as accident rained them down upon our
heads. Animals have to do this, but men raise their heads higher and
breathe freely in the upper conceptual air.
The enormous esteem professed by all philosophers for the
conceptual form of consciousness is easy to understand. From Plato's
time downwards it has been held to be our sole avenue to essential
truth. Concepts are universal, changeless, pure; their relations are
eternal; they are spiritual, while the concrete particulars which they
enable us to handle are corrupted by the flesh. They are precious in
themselves, then, apart from their original use, and confer new dignity
upon our life.
One can find no fault with this way of feeling about concepts so long as
their original function does not get swallowed up in the admiration
and lost. That function is of course to enlarge mentally our momentary
experiences by ADDING to them the consequences conceived; but
unfortunately, that function is not only too often forgotten by
philosophers in their reasonings, but is often converted into its exact
opposite, and made a means of diminishing the original experience
by DENYING (implicitly or explicitly) all its features save the one
specially abstracted to conceive it by.
This itself is a highly abstract way of stating my complaint, and it
needs to be redeemed from obscurity by showing instances of what is
meant. Some beliefs very dear to my own heart have been conceived in
this viciously abstract way by critics. One is the 'will to believe,' so
called; another is the indeterminism of certain futures; a third is the
notion that truth may vary with the standpoint of the man who holds it.
I believe that the perverse abuse of the abstracting function has led
critics to employ false arguments against these doctrines, and often has
led their readers to false conclusions. I should like to try to save the
situation, if possible, by a few counter-critical remarks.
Let me give the name of 'vicious abstractionism' to a way of using
concepts which may be thus described: We conceive a concrete situation
by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and classing it
under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the
positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we
proceed to use our concept privatively; reducing the originally rich
phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken,
treating it as a case of 'nothing but' that concept, and acting as if
all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted
were expunged. [Footnote: Let not the reader confound the fallacy here
described with legitimately negative inferences such as those drawn in
the mood 'celarent' of the logic-books.] Abstraction, functioning in
this way, becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance
in thought. It mutilates things; it creates difficulties and finds
impossibilities; and more than half the trouble that metaphysicians and
logicians give themselves over the paradoxes and dialectic puzzles of
the universe may, I am convinced, be traced to this relatively simple
source. THE VICIOUSLY PRIVATIVE EMPLOYMENT OF ABSTRACT CHARACTERS AND
CLASS NAMES is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the
rationalistic mind.
To proceed immediately to concrete examples, cast a glance at the belief
in 'free will,' demolished with such specious persuasiveness recently
by the skilful hand of Professor Fullerton. [Footnote: Popular Science
Monthly, N. Y., vols. lviii and lix.] When a common man says that his
will is free, what does he mean? He means that there are situations of
bifurcation inside of his life in which two futures seem to him equally
possible, for both have their roots equally planted in his present and
his past. Either, if realized, will grow out of his previous motives,
character and circumstances, and will continue uninterruptedly the
pulsations of his personal life. But sometimes both at once are
incompatible with physical nature, and then it seems to the naive
observer as if he made a choice between them NOW, and that the question
of which future is to be, instead of having been decided at the
foundation of the world, were decided afresh at every passing moment in
I which fact seems livingly to grow, and possibility seems, in turning
itself towards one act, to exclude all others.
He who takes things at their face-value here may indeed be deceived. He
may far too often mistake his private ignorance of what is predetermined
for a real indetermination of what is to be. Yet, however imaginary
it may be, his picture of the situation offers no appearance of breach
between the past and future. A train is the same train, its passengers
are the same passengers, its momentum is the same momentum, no matter
which way the switch which fixes its direction is placed. For the
indeterminist there is at all times enough past for all the different
futures in sight, and more besides, to find their reasons in it, and
whichever future comes will slide out of that past as easily as the
train slides by the switch. The world, in short, is just as CONTINUOUS
WITH ITSELF for the believers in free will as for the rigorous
determinists, only the latter are unable to believe in points of
bifurcation as spots of really indifferent equilibrium or as containing
shunts which there--and there only, NOT BEFORE--direct existing motions
without altering their amount.
Were there such spots of indifference, the rigorous determinists think,
the future and the past would be separated absolutely, for, ABSTRACTLY
TAKEN, THE WORD 'INDIFFERENT' SUGGESTS DISCONNECTION SOLELY. Whatever
is indifferent is in so far forth unrelated and detached. Take the
term thus strictly, and you see, they tell us, that if any spot of
indifference is found upon the broad highway between the past and the
future, then no connection of any sort whatever, no continuous momentum,
no identical passenger, no common aim or agent, can be found on both
sides of the shunt or switch which there is moved. The place is an
impassable chasm.