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INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.
PROP. VI.————
element common to all cognition, and also an ele- ment peculiar to itself. All knowledge requires two factors, one of which is particular, and the other universal. This consideration effects the complete demolition of nominalism.
The summing up.31. The summing up is this: All the errors inherited by the systems which have been brought under review, originate in the capital oversight which mistakes the elements of cognition for kinds of cognition—the factors of ideas for ideas themselves, the constituents of thought for thoughts. This mistake was equivalent to the hypothesis that some cognitions were particular, and that others were general, or universal. This hypothesis, when carried into ontology, led to the further mistake that there were general existences in nature corresponding to the general cognitions, just as there were held to be particular existences in nature corresponding to the particular cognitions. The doctrine of Realism was proclaimed. Realism was corrected by conceptualism, which maintained that the general existences had no reality in nature, but only an ideality in the mind—that they existed only as abstractions, and were not independent of the intelligence which fabricates them. This scheme fell dead before the assaults of nominalism, which asserted, and with perfect truth, that these general existences had not even an ideality in the mind—that the genera and species had no distinct standing, even as abstractions, and that intel-