German), e.g. Theology, Jurisprudence, political and moral disciplines, is not (in our sense) free science; it has so far remained fettered to tradition and popular belief, often also to convention and legislation. Mathematics and the mathematical sciences correspond most closely to our concept of science. Everything which is called science, like everything which is called art, has its terminology, its technical concepts. But for the most part these are not concepts in the sense we are now using, but only special names for special objects—things and activities which, in the experience of those devoted to such arts and sciences, have prominent significance. This in no way involves that those things and activities are not objective, therefore given for every one. It is different in science properly so-called. It (that is the mental activity devoted to it) forms its concepts, exclusively for its own ends, as mere things of thought, indifferent whether they occur in any experience, even knowing the impossibility of such occurrence. The natural growth of universal concepts, better called universal ideas, is not generally, or at any rate not with sufficient clearness, distinguished from this artificial, conscious formation of “abgezogener” (as in the last century “abstract” was translated into German) concepts. The natural growth of universal ideas precedes the growth of particular ideas; the former is an incomplete defective idea, with which an appropriate name is regularly attached to a few or even to one single prominent characteristic of perceived objects. Characteristics are, as the word (Merkmale) indicates, marks to help the memory, and indeed for the speaker they are the immediate causes of the name occurring. All names are originally both proper names and generic names. The often-cited instance of the little child who calls every man “papa” who does not by a new characteristic excite new feelings, is typical of the connexion of general ideas with names. Every apperception-mass (in the sense of Herbart and Steinthal) which, once connected with a verbal sign, sets free the idea of this verbal sign when it is excited by actual perception, is a universal idea. The progress of knowledge attaches itself to the possession and knowledge of several names for the same object, to the distinction between them, i.e., reference to different grounds or simply to the fact of being so-called; it is therefore connected also with the knowledge of different names for known objects in so far as they differ from each other, as with the knowledge of like names for the same object in so far as they are in some way similar to each other. To think of a condition as
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