adventitious, detachable status, and because they are so easily compared
and manipulated in the world of sound, were singularly well fitted for
this office. They are not vague, as any common quality abstracted from
things would necessarily become; and though vagueness is a quality only
too compatible with perception, so that vague ideas can exist without
end, this vagueness is not what makes them universal in their functions.
It is one thing to perceive an ill-determined form and quite another to
attribute to it a precise general predicate. Words, distinct in their
own category and perfectly recognisable, can accordingly perform very
well the function of embodying a universal; for they can be identified
in turn with many particulars and yet remain throughout particular
themselves.

[Sidenote: Nominalism right in psychology and realism in logic]

The psychology of nominalism is undoubtedly right where it insists that
every image is particular and every term, in its existential aspect, a
_flatum vocis_; but nominalists should have recognised that images may
have any degree of vagueness and generality when measured by a
conceptual standard. A figure having obviously three sides and three
corners may very well be present to the mind when it is impossible to
say whether it is an equilateral or a rectangular triangle. Functional
or logical universality lies in another sphere altogether, being a
matter of intent and not of existence. When we say that "universals
alone exist in the mind" we mean by "mind" something unknown to
Berkeley; not a bundle of psychoses nor an angelic substance, but quick
intelligence, the faculty of discourse. Predication is an act,
understanding a spiritual and transitive operation: its existential
basis may well be counted in psychologically and reduced to a stream of
immediate presences; but its meaning can be caught only by another
meaning, as life only can exemplify life. Vague or general images are as
little universal as sounds are; but a sound better than a flickering
abstraction can serve the intellect in its operation of comparison and
synthesis. Words are therefore the body of discourse, of which the soul
is understanding.

[Sidenote: Literature moves between the extremes of music and
denotation.]

The categories of discourse are in part merely representative, in part
merely grammatical, and in part attributable to both spheres. Euphony
and phonetic laws are principles governing languag