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There is thus a conflict between the need of brevity, which leads us to look for concrete formulæ, and the necessity of being precise, which requires us to adopt detailed formulæ. Formulæ which are too short make science vague and illusory, formulæ which are too long encumber it and make it useless.
It is evident that these words, when concrete, are, like other concrete general names, connotative; they denote a subject, and connote an attribute: and each of them has or might have a corresponding abstract name, to denote the attribute connoted by the concrete.
These organizations are often of a quasi-religious or pseudo-religious character, and are participated in by both men and women. Examples will present themselves in abundance on reflection, but for the purpose of indicating the range of the propensities in question and of characterizing them, some of the more obvious concrete cases may be cited.
If such a use of history is indeed to be educative for us, we must avoid the conventional view of it, as a mere chronicle of past events; and of historic personalities as stuffed specimens exhibited against a flat tapestried background, more or less picturesque, but always thought of in opposition to the concrete thickness of the modern world.
For instance, every observer of children knows that memory for objects develops before memory for words; that memory for gestures preceded memory for words; that memory for oral language preceded memory for written language; that memory for concrete objects preceded memory for abstractions.
Corydon declared herself willing to do her share in the matter of saving money; but it seemed to him that whenever he suggested a concrete idea, there would be objections. "We can get up at dawn," he would say, "and save the cost of oil." "Yes," she would answer. "And we can do our own laundry," he would continue.
I call the exercise of this factor in our knowledge 'recognition, and the requisite sense-awareness of the comparable characters I call 'sense-recognition. Recognition and abstraction essentially involve each other. Each of them exhibits an entity for knowledge which is less than the concrete fact, but is a real factor in that fact.
Only they were all printed flashingly in bright primary colors, reds and greens predominating. As the last gay asterisk faded from before his blinking eyes Red Hoss found himself sitting down on a hard concrete sidewalk. Coincidentally other discoveries made themselves manifest to his understanding.
This attitude, where it concerns religion, involves two corollaries: first, what in accordance with Hebrew precedent may be called symbolically faith in God, that is, confidence in one's own impulse and destiny, a confidence which the world in the end is sure to reward; and second, abomination of all contrary religious tenets and practices of asceticism, for instance, because it denies the will; of idolatry and myth, because they render divinity concrete rather than relative to inner cravings and essentially responsive; finally of tradition and institutional authority, because these likewise jeopardise the soul's experimental development as, in profound isolation, she wrestles with reality and with her own inspiration.
But in this second article a completely different process is observed. We are no longer considering man's essential nature in the abstract, but are becoming involved in arguments of concrete experience. The first was declared to be a sacred right, as it followed from a law of nature; the second is merely conditioned by the reasons brought forward to support it.
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