The Origin of Ideas (Volume 2) - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1883. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... article ii. Where lies the difficulty of explaining the three classes of ideas just enumerated. 510. Our mind performs three successive operations: (1) it perceives intellectually; (2) it separates the idea from the perception; (3) it draws from the idea the abstracts, which are also the links whereby ideas are joined together and complex ideas formed.1 The first of these three operations is performed through universalisation; the second through an abstraction exercised on the perceptions; the third through an abstraction exercised on the ideas already formed. 511. Universalisation has no need of the faculty of reflection? It takes place by a direct and natural action of our spirit, which, leaving aside the judgment affirmative of the subsistence inherent in the perception, retains the determinate idea alone. By determinate idea I mean that union between the thing felt and the idea of being, which is effected in virtue of the unity of the human subject, at once sentient and possessed of the intuition of being; so that these two elements--i.e. being, as determinable, and the thing felt, as determinant--come of themselves to be found together in the same subject, and are conjoined, by the identity, so to speak, of the place in which they meet. 1 Complex ideas are formed subsequently to the abstract by reflection. When reflation and abstract ideas are explained, it is no longer difficult to understand the formation of complex ideas: hence I do not think it necessary to dwell on these. 2 If by reflection is meant that tapacity which the intellectual faculty u tf turning itself upon the products 'f its own operations, universalisation has no need of reflection. On the one hand there is the sensation which is a direct act of our soul, and on the other there is the int...