< Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu
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CONCEIVABILITY AND THE INFINITE.

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concept. In general, however, the attention is not so completely exclusive as this; it leaves room in consciousness for other elements of the concrete idea; though of these the consciousness is faint, in proportion to the energy of the concentrative effort, and the moment the attention relaxes, if the same concrete idea continues to be contemplated, its other constituents come out into consciousness. General concepts, therefore, we have, properly speaking, none; we have only complex ideas of objects in the concrete: but we are able to attend exclusively to certain parts of the concrete idea; and, by that exclusive attention, we enable those parts to determine exclusively the course of our thoughts as subsequently called up by association; and are in a condition to carry on a train of meditation or reasoning relating to those parts only, exactly as if we were able to conceive them separately from the rest."

This passage is so clearly in harmony with the views of the Conceptualist, as I have portrayed them, that it seems scarcely necessary to comment upon it. But I cannot resist the temptation to delay for a moment over an inconsistency into which Mill was forced by his attempt to recognise, though a Nominalist, a truth which the Nominalist pure and simple cannot recognise. The formation of a concept, he insists, does not consist "in separating the attributes said to compose it, from all other attributes of the same object, and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoined from any others": this position he emphasises by the further affirmation, that "we neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cognise them in any way as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in combination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual object". These sentences are certainly unequivocal;—they contain an emphatic assertion of the Nominalistic doctrine. But side by side with such statements we find it asserted that we may fix the attention upon the attributes constituent of the concept, to the neglect of the other attributes of the object, and that, while the concentration of attention actually lasts, if it is sufficiently intense, "we may be temporarily unconscious of any of the other attributes, and may really, for a brief interval, have nothing present to our mind but the attributes constituent of the concept". Surely, if the only elements before the mind are those constituent of the concept; if we may be conscious of these, even for a brief interval, and conscious of these alone;—surely in such a case we conceive, or think, or in some way cognise the attributes forming the concept as separate and apart, and not, for the time being, in combination with numerous other attributes. Mill goes even further in the above admission than most of us would care to follow him. In speaking as he does of the process, and not distinguishing between the imagining of an object and the knowing of one or more of its isolated qualities, he

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