Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/177

That which is one positive, indivisible thing, must remain entire as this, or cease to exist. There is no alternative between individuality and nothing. As long as we are determined to consider any one thing or idea, as the knot of a chain, or the figure of a man, or any thing else, as one individual, it must, as it were, go together: we can take nothing away without destroying it altogether. I have already shewn that there is no one object which does not consist of a number of parts and relations, or which does not require a comprehensive facility in the mind in order to conceive of it. Now abstraction is a necessary consequence of the limitation of this power of the mind, and if it were a previous condition of our having the ideas of things that we should comprehend distinctly all the particulars of which they are composed, we could have no ideas at all. An imperfectly comprehended is a general idea. But the mind perfectly comprehends the whole of no one object. That is, it has not an absolute and distinct knowledge of all its parts or differences, and consequently all our ideas are abstractions, that is a general and confused result from a number of undistinguished, and undistinguishable impressions, for there is no possible medium between a perfectly distinct comprehension of all the particulars, which is impossible, or that imperfect and confused one, that properly constitutes a general notion in the one case or the other. To explain this more particularly. In looking at any object, as a house on the opposite side of the way, it is supposed that the impression I have of it is a perfectly distinct, precise, or definite idea, in which abstraction has no concern. And the general idea of a house, it is said, is rather a mere word, or must reduce itself to some such positive, individual image as that conveyed by the sight of a particular house, it being impossible that