absque universalibus enim non datur scientia). Conceptions are precisely those universalia, whose mode of existence formed the argument of the long controversy between the Realists and Nominalists in the Middle Ages.
§ 28. Representatives of Conceptions. The Faculty of Judgment.
Conceptions must not be confounded with pictures of the imagination, these being intuitive and complete, therefore individual representations, although they are not called forth by sensuous impressions and do not therefore belong to the complex of experience. Even when used to represent a conception, a picture of the imagination (phantasm) ought to be distinguished from a conception. We use phantasms as representatives of conceptions when we try to grasp the intuitive representation itself that has given rise to the conception and to make it tally with that conception, which is in all cases impossible ; for there is no representation, for instance, of dog in general, colour in general, triangle in general, number in general, nor is there any picture of the imagination which corresponds to these conceptions. Then we evoke the phantasm of some dog or other, which, as a representation, must in all cases be determined : that is, it must have a certain size, shape, colour, &c. &c. ; even though the conception represented by it has no such determinations. When we use such representatives of conceptions however, we are always conscious that they are not adequate to the conceptions they represent, and that they are full of arbitrary determinations. Towards the end of the first part of his
