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Updated: May 29, 2025
The praise is built rather upon the popular idea of Demosthenes, than upon the real Demosthenes. And not only so, but even upon style itself, and upon the art of composition in abstracto, Lord Brougham does not seem to have formed any clear conceptions principles he has none. Now, it is useless to judge of an artist until you have some principles on the art.
The pain of an ungratified desire is small compared with that of repentance; for the former has to face the immeasurable, open future; the latter the past, which is closed irrevocably. Money is human happiness in abstracto; so that a man who is no longer capable of enjoying it in concrete gives up his whole heart to it.
But there certainly are imaginable, in abstracto, infinitely many possibilities of other elements and primitive beginnings of the world, perhaps of some whose result would have been but an eternal chaos, or of others whose result would have been but an eternal rigidness, or of still others whose result would also have been a certain order and variety of phenomena and processes, but less beautiful than that of the really existing world.
In the same way, we cannot cogitate relations of things in abstracto, if we commence with conceptions alone, in any other manner than that one is the cause of determinations in the other; for that is itself the conception of the understanding or category of relation.
For Ulrici, in his "God and Nature," is right in calling our attention to the fact that we must think about the atoms, not in an abstractly logical and an abstractly mathematical way, but concretely; that we have to consider them, not as mere quantities, but as qualities; and that we can then easily arrive at the perception of something which occupies space, and which therefore, according to abstract conclusions of logic and mathematics, could still be thought of as divisible in abstracto, but which, even as a consequence of its quality, of its concrete natural form, is no longer divisible in reality.
In abstracto, we can naturally make no objection to the possibility of such a development, as soon as we once accept the evolution theory; but we have to object to the supposition of such a process in infinitum.
I challenge anyone to produce a solitary example of invention wrought out in abstracto, and free from any factors of feeling. Human nature does not allow such a miracle. Now, let us take up the special case of esthetic creation, and of forms approaching thereto. Here again we find the original emotional element as at first motor, then attached to various aspects of creation, as an accompaniment.
But women are by no means conscious of this leading principle in abstracto, they are only conscious of it in concreto, and have no other way of expressing it than in the manner in which they act when the opportunity arrives.
For the monist, all is on one level of being. He may by constant effort keep that level high. But gravity will act. We are more prone to degrade God to our level, than to rise to His. The same truth can be put in abstracto. Unless the relation between God and the world be preserved as a true relation, the higher term will sooner or later fall to the level of the lower, and be lost in it.
Even if, in a purely hypothetical way, a language could be thought of in abstracto, the roots of which only consist in imitations of sounds or interjections, still in the really existing languages, so far as we can trace back and uncover their roots, the roots imitating sounds and the interjectional roots form only a small and entirely isolated minority, which neither shares in, nor is capable of development; they stand like "dead sticks in a live hedge."
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