186
INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.
PROP. VI.————
or to the species man, or to the genus figure, or to the species triangle. But is there any object in thought corresponding to these genera and species? There certainly is not. These general terms are mere words, mere sounds, which have no objects corresponding to them either within the mind or out of it,—either in thought or in reality. Their ideal is quite as baseless and as fabulous as their real existence. So says Nominalism, speaking a truth which, when understood, is seen to be unquestionable.
Evasion by which conceptualism endeavours to recover her ground, and to conciliate nominalism. Its failure.28. The grounds of nominalism, however, are not very well understood, even by the nominalists themselves; and hence conceptualism is supposed to recover her position, or at least to effect a compromise with her adversary, by affirming that the object which the mind contemplates when it employs a general term is some resemblance, some point or points of similarity, which it observes among a number of particular things, and that to this resemblance it gives a name expressive of the genus to which the things in question belong. This explanation—which, although it is as old as the earliest defence of conceptualism, and a traditional commonplace in every logical compendium, has been paraded, in recent times, by Dr Brown, almost as if it were a novelty of his own discovery—betrays a total misconception of the point really at issue.