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INSTITUTES OF METAPHYSIC.
PROP. VI.————
that the women were mere elements of human beings,—and finally, were to declare that although the men were different from the women, the women were not different from the men. That hank, which illustrates the confused subterfuges of conceptualism, we shall not waste time in unravelling.
Nominalism.29. Nominalism stands victorious; but nominalism, too, is doomed very speedily to fall. The character of nominalism is this: it holds that all existences are particular; and that all cognitions are particular at first, and that they remain for ever particular. There are no such entities, either real or ideal, either in the mind or out of it, as general conceptions: but what is taken for such is always some mere particular cognition, which, by a determination of thought, is allowed to stand as representative of all cognitions and presentations which may resemble it. Thus there is no conception of triangle in general. When the mind thinks of this figure, it always conceives one or more definite and particular triangles, which it accepts as representative of all possible or actual triangles. It thinks of one or of several triangles with a mental reservation, that the varieties of which that figure is susceptible are not exhausted by the specimens of which it is thinking. This is what the mind does, when it supposes itself to be entertaining a general conception—it is, all the while, entertaining one