have occasion." Treatise of Human Nature, p. 43, 4. The author afterwards adds, with his usual candour, that this account does not perfectly satisfy him, but he relies principally on the logical demonstration of the impossibilities of abstract ideas just before given.
I confess it does not seem an easy matter to recover the argument in this state of it; however, I will attempt it. What I shall endeavour will not be so much to answer the *foregoing reasoning as to prove that in a strict sense all ideas whatever are mere abstractions and can be nothing else; that some of the most clear, distinct, and positive ideas of particular objects are made up of numberless inconsistencies; and that as Hume expresses it, they do touch the soul, and are not drawn distinctly in the imagination, &c. Though I shall not be able to point out distinctly the fallacy of the foregoing reasonings, I hope to make it appear that there must be something wrong in the premises, and that the nature of thought and ideas is quite different from what is here supposed. I may be allowed to set off one paradox against another, and as these writers affirm that all abstract ideas are particular images, so I shall try to prove that all particular images are abstract ideas. If it can be made to appear that our ideas of particular things themselves are not particular, it may be easily granted that those which are in general allowed to be abstract are all so. The existence of abstract and complex ideas in the mind has been disputed for the same reason, that is, in falsely attributing individuality, or absolute unity to the objects of sense. While each thing or object was said to be absolutely one and simple, there was found to be no reach, compass, or expansion of mind, to comprehend it; and, on the other hand, there was no room on the same supposition for the doctrine of abstraction, for there is no abstracting from absolute unity.
