The Concept

Abstract

We must now look more closely at the concept as a mental entity. Remembering that one cannot imagine a man who is neither young nor old, tall nor short, that is, a man in general; likewise, that every triangle must be imagined either acute, obtuse or right-angled, so that there is no triangle in general: we might easily conclude that there are no such mental constructs as concepts at all, nor abstract ideas, a denial that Berkeley had defended with special vigour. However, we might just as easily be led to the view of the ‘nominalist’ Roscelin that general concepts or universals do not exist as things but are mere ‘flatus vocis’, while his ‘realist’ opponents regarded them as grounded in things. That general concepts are not, as a respected mathematician asserted quite recently, mere words, clearly emerges from the fact that very abstract propositions are understood and correctly applied in concrete instances, witness the countless applications of the proposition “energy remain constant”. It would however be idle to attempt to find a clear, momentary conscious idea which would exactly cover the sense of the sentence as it is spoken or heard. The difficulty disappears if we recognize that concepts are not momentary entities, like a simple concrete symbolic idea: every concept has its sometimes long and eventful formative history, and its content cannot be explicitly expounded by a transient thought.¹