brain has only a limited number
of pigeon-holes for our correspondence with an unlimited universe of
objective uniques, that we have to delude ourselves into the belief that
there is a chairishness in this species common to and distinctive of all
chairs.

Classification and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of
objective realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon
things...

Greek thought impresses me as being over much obsessed by an objective
treatment of certain necessary preliminary conditions of human
thought--number and definition and class and abstract form! But these
things,--number, definition, class and abstract form,--I hold, are
merely unavoidable conditions of mental activity--regrettable conditions
rather than essential facts. THE FORCEPS OF OUR MINDS ARE CLUMSY FORCEPS
AND CRUSH THE TRUTH A LITTLE IN TAKING HOLD OF IT...

Let me give you a rough figure of what I am trying to convey in this
first attack upon the philosophical validity of general terms. You have
seen the result of those various methods of black and white reproduction
that involve the use of a rectangular net. You know the sort of process
picture I mean--it used to be employed very frequently in reproducing
photographs. At a little distance you really seem to have a faithful
reproduction of the original picture, but when you peer closely you
find not the unique form and masses of the original, but a multitude of
little rectangles, uniform in shape and size. The more earnestly you go
into the thing, the closelier you look, the more the picture is lost
in reticulations. I submit, the world of reasoned inquiry has a very
similar relation to the world of fact. For the rough purposes of every
day the network picture will do, but the finer your purpose the less it
will serve, and for an ideally fine purpose, for absolute and general
knowledge that will be as true for a man at a distance with a telescope
as for a man with a microscope, it will not serve at all.

It is true you can make your net of logical interpretation finer and
finer, you can fine your classification more and more--up to a certain
limit. But essentially you are working in limits, and as you come
closer, as you look at finer and subtler things, as you leave the
practical purpose for which the method exists, the element of error
increases. Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at its edges;
and so in my way of thinking, relentless lo