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Updated: June 17, 2025
But there was a devastating cynicism at the bottom of her. She did not believe in her own universals they were sham. She did not believe in the inner life it was a trick, not a reality. She did not believe in the spiritual world it was an affectation. In the last resort, she believed in Mammon, the flesh, and the devil these at least were not sham.
Of this the reaction of the horse to the smell of the bear is an instance, and so is the reaction of the man who says "bear" under the same circumstances. The verbal reaction is, of course, the most important from the point of view of what may be called knowledge of universals.
This agent an angel or a sphere, or an angel using a sphere as its instrument bestows forms upon bodies, which take the places of the previous forms the bodies had. Now the human soul has the most important power of all other animals, that of grasping intelligibles or universals. It is also able to discriminate between good and evil in conduct, moral, political and economic.
Among universals, there seems to be no principle by which we can decide which can be known by acquaintance, but it is clear that among those that can be so known are sensible qualities, relations of space and time, similarity, and certain abstract logical universals.
But surely the energies of intellect are more worthy our concern than the operations of sense; and the science of universals, permanent and fixed, must be superior to the knowledge of particulars, fleeting and frail.
But in all cases of knowledge by description, we need some connexion of universals, enabling us, from such and such a datum, to infer an object of a certain sort as implied by our datum.
Hesiod and the Orphic poets moved in a region of half-personification in which the meaning or principle appeared through the person. In their vaster conceptions of Chaos, Erebus, Aether, Night, and the like, the first rude attempts at generalization are dimly seen. The Gods themselves, especially the greater Gods, such as Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Athene, are universals as well as individuals.
For it is this plurality of contact that vitalizes, and he who has not drawn his universals of character out of the particulars of everyday life is a cloistered theorist, aloof from reality. The history of Man's thought is the real history of mankind. Back of all the events of history are the curious systems of beliefs for which men have lived and died.
When we examine common words, we find that, broadly speaking, proper names stand for particulars, while other substantives, adjectives, prepositions, and verbs stand for universals. Pronouns stand for particulars, but are ambiguous: it is only by the context or the circumstances that we know what particulars they stand for.
Unless there can be shown somewhere a parallel attempt, the statement is as undeniably true as it is certainly unpretentious. II. Next, Dr. For so-called modern philosophy rests complacently in a theory of universals which is thoroughly mediæval or antiquated." What personal pretension, even of the mildest sort, can be conceived to lurk in these innocent words?
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