pen to correspond to an experience actually animating the
object to which they are assigned. This is the case in which the object
is a body similar in structure and action to the percipient himself, who
assigns to that body a passion he has caught by contagion from it and by
imitation of its actual attitude. Such are the conditions of
intelligible expression and true communion; beyond these limits nothing
is possible save myth and metaphor, or the algebraic designation of
observed habits under the name of moral dispositions.

CHAPTER VII--CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE

[Sidenote: So-called abstract qualities primary.]

Ideas of material objects ordinarily absorb the human mind, and their
prevalence has led to the rash supposition that ideas of all other kinds
are posterior to physical ideas and drawn from the latter by a process
of abstraction. The table, people said, was a particular and single
reality; its colour, form, and material were parts of its integral
nature, qualities which might be attended to separately, perhaps, but
which actually existed only in the table itself. Colour, form, and
material were therefore abstract elements. They might come before the
mind separately and be contrasted objects of attention, but they were
incapable of existing in nature except together, in the concrete reality
called a particular thing. Moreover, as the same colour, shape, or
substance might be found in various tables, these abstract qualities
were thought to be general qualities as well; they were universal terms
which might be predicated of many individual things. A contrast could
then be drawn between these qualities or ideas, which the mind may
envisage, and the concrete reality existing beyond. Thus philosophy
could reach the familiar maxim of Aristotle that the particular alone
exists in nature and the general alone in the mind.

[Sidenote: General qualities prior to particular things.]

Such language expresses correctly enough a secondary conventional stage
of conception, but it ignores the primary fictions on which convention
itself must rest. Individual physical objects must be discovered before
abstractions can be made from their conceived nature; the bird must be
caught before it is plucked. To discover a physical object is to pack in
the same part of space, and fuse in one complex body, primary data like
coloured form and tangible surface. Intelligence, observing these
sensible qualities to