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Whether I say "The ground is damp" or "The ground is not damp," in both cases the terms "ground" and "damp" are concepts more or less artificially created by the mind of man extracted, by his free initiative, from the continuity of experience. In both cases the concepts are represented by the same conventional words.
But its actions have already by themselves adopted the principal lines of human action; they have made out the same general directions in the material world as we have; they depend upon the same objects bound together by the same relations; so that animal intelligence, although it does not form concepts properly so called, already moves in a conceptual atmosphere.
The further the progress of the knowledge of physical objects advances the more the concepts become removed from the level of the sensuous; as is witnessed, for instance, in the forms of laws and hypotheses, which constitute the very groundwork of physical science. This is a fact so familiar that it needs no further elucidation here.
That such concepts should be analyzed has, I hope, been made clear, if only that erroneous and misleading notions as to these things should be avoided. But when a man with a genius for metaphysical analysis addresses himself to this task, he cannot simply hand the results attained by his reflections over to his less reflective fellow-man.
May cooperation be permitted and be the mutual aim of those who, under the concepts of our Constitution, hold to differing political faiths; so that all may work for the good of our beloved country and Thy glory. Amen. My fellow citizens: The world and we have passed the midway point of a century of continuing challenge.
The waiting habit in our transactions, domestic as well as foreign, arises from our inveterate preference for thinking in images rather than in concepts. We put off decisions until the whole of the facts can be visualized. This carries with it that we often do not act until it is very late. Our gifts enable us to move with energy, if not always with precision.
No doubt, it is logically unjustifiable to argue from the variable concept to the variability of the species. Still there is something real in plants and animals which corresponds to our specific concepts.
The momentous nature of the contemporary transformation of the Orient is nowhere better attested than by the changes effected in the lives of its peoples. That dynamic influence of the West which is modifying governmental forms, political concepts, religious beliefs, and economic processes is proving equally potent in the range of social phenomena.
Impossible! The three natures are so clearly interrelated, each depends so much upon the others, that the separate and independent development of any one is impossible. The spiritual depends upon the intellectual as the house rests upon the foundation. Its mental pictures, its concepts, its beliefs, come out of it, and are marred, misshapen, untrue, just to the extent to which that is faulty.
But there are the social and historical contacts which are made by all these creative types with the past and with the present; all the big rich thick stream of human history and effort, giving them, however little they may recognize it, the very initial concepts with which they go to their special contact with reality, and which colour it; supporting them and demanding from them again their contribution to the racial treasury, and to the present too.
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