CHAPTER IX
THE WORLD OF
UNIVERSALS
AT the end of the
preceding chapter we saw that such entities as
relations appear to have a being which is in some
way different from that of physical objects, and
also different from that of minds and from that of
sense-data.(Note 1)
In the present chapter we have to consider what is
the nature of this kind of being, and also what
objects there are that have this kind of being. We
will begin with the latter question.
The problem with which
we are now concerned is a very old one, since it
was brought into philosophy by Plato. (Note 2)Plato's
'theory of ideas' is an attempt to solve this very
problem, and in my opinion it is one of the most
successful attempts hitherto made. The theory to
be advocated in what follows is largely Plato's,
with merely such modifications as time has shown
to be necessary.
The
way the problem arose for Plato was more or less
as follows. Let us consider, say, such a notion as
justice. If we ask ourselves what justice
is, it is natural to proceed by considering this,
that, and the other just act, with a view to
discovering what they have in common. They must
all, in some sense, partake of a common nature,
which will be found in whatever is just and in
nothing else. This common nature, in virtue of
which they are all just, will be justice itself,
the pure essence the admixture of which with facts
of ordinary life produces the multiplicity of just
acts. Similarly with any other word
which may be applicable to common facts, such
as 'whiteness' for example. The word will be
applicable to a number of particular things
because they all participate in a common
nature or essence. This pure essence is what
Plato calls an 'idea' or 'form'. (It must not
be supposed that 'ideas', in his sense, exist
in minds, though they may be apprehended by
minds.) (Note 3)
The 'idea' justice is not identical with
anything that is just: it is something other than
particular things, which particular things partake
of. Not being particular, it cannot itself exist
in the world of sense. Moreover it is not fleeting
or changeable like the things of sense: it is
eternally itself, immutable and indestructible. (Note 4)
Thus Plato is led to a
supra-sensible world, more real than the
common world of sense, the unchangeable world
of ideas, which alone gives to the world of
sense whatever pale reflection of reality may
belong to it. The truly real world, for Plato,
is the world of ideas; for whatever we may
attempt to say about things in the world of
sense, we can only succeed in saying that they
participate in such and such ideas, which,
therefore, constitute all their character.
(Note
5)
Hence it is easy to pass on into a mysticism.
We may hope, in a mystic illumination, to see the
ideas as we see objects of sense; and we may
imagine that the ideas exist in heaven. These
mystical developments are very natural, but the
basis of the theory is in logic, and it is as
based in logic that we have to consider it.
The
word 'idea' has acquired, in the course of time,
many associations which are quite misleading when
applied to Plato's 'ideas'. We shall therefore use
the word 'universal' instead of the word 'idea',
to describe what Plato meant. (Note 6)
The essence of the sort of entity that Plato meant
is that it is opposed to the particular things
that are given in sensation. We speak of whatever is given
in sensation, or is of the same nature as
things given in sensation, as a particular; by
opposition to this, a universal will
be anything which may be shared by many
particulars, and has those characteristics
which, as we saw, distinguish justice and
whiteness from just acts and white things.
(Note
7)
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. The word
'now' stands for a particular, namely the
present moment; but like pronouns, it stands
for an ambiguous particular, because the
present is always changing. (Note 8)
It will be seen that no sentence can be made up
without at least one word which denotes a
universal. (Note 9)
The nearest approach would be some such statement
as 'I like this'. But even here the word 'like'
denotes a universal, for I may like other things,
and other people may like things. Thus all truths
involve universals, and all knowledge of truths
involves acquaintance with universals. (Note 10)
Seeing that nearly all
the words to be found in the dictionary stand for
universals, it is strange that hardly anybody
except students of philosophy ever realizes that
there are such entities as universals. (Note 11)
We do not naturally dwell upon those words in a
sentence which do not stand for particulars; and
if we are forced to dwell upon a word which stands
for a universal, we naturally think of it as
standing for some one of the particulars that come
under the universal.(Note 12)
When, for example, we hear the sentence, 'Charles
I's head was cut off', we may naturally enough
think of Charles I, of Charles I's head, and of
the operation of cutting of his head,
which are all particulars; but we do not naturally
dwell upon what is meant by the word 'head' or the
word 'cut', which is a universal. We feel such
words to be incomplete and insubstantial; they
seem to demand a context before anything can be
done with them. Hence we succeed in avoiding all
notice of universals as such, until the study of
philosophy forces them upon our attention (Note 13)
Even among philosophers, we may say, broadly, that
only those universals which are named by
adjectives or substantives have been much or often
recognized, while those named by verbs and
prepositions have been usually overlooked. (Note 14)This
omission has had a very great effect upon
philosophy; it is hardly too much to say that most
metaphysics, since Spinoza, has been largely
determined by it. The way this has occurred is, in
outline, as follows: Speaking generally,
adjectives and common nouns express qualities or
properties of single things, whereas prepositions
and verbs tend to express relations between two or
more things. Thus the neglect of prepositions
and verbs led to the belief that every
proposition can be regarded as attributing a
property to a single thing, rather than as
expressing a relation between two or more
things. Hence it was supposed that,
ultimately, there can be no such entities as
relations between things. (Note 15)
Hence either there can be only one thing in the
universe, or, if there are many things, they
cannot possibly interact in any way, since any
interaction would be a relation, and relations are
impossible.
The first of these
views, advocated by Spinoza and held in our own
day by Bradley and many other philosophers, is
called monism; the second, advocated
Leibniz but not very common nowadays, is called monadism,
because each of the isolated things is cd a monad.
Both these opposing philosophies, interesting as
they are, result, in my opinion, from an undue
attention to one sort of universals, namely the
sort represented by adjectives and substantives
rather than by verbs and prepositions.
As
a matter of fact, if any one were anxious to deny
altogether that there are such things as
universals, we should find that we cannot strictly
prove that there are such entities as qualities,
i.e. the universals represented by adjectives and
substantives, whereas we can prove that there must
be relations, i.e. the sort of
universals generally represented by verbs and
prepositions. Let us take in illustration
the universal whiteness. If we
believe that there is such a universal, we
shall say that things are white because they
have the quality of whiteness. This view,
however, was strenuously denied by Berkeley
and Hume, who have been followed in this by
later empiricists. The form which their denial
took was to deny that there are such things as
'abstract ideas'. When we want to think of
whiteness, they said, we form an image of some
particular white thing, and reason concerning
this particular, taking care not to deduce
anything concerning it which we cannot see to
be equally true of any other white thing. As
an account of our actual mental processes,
this is no doubt largely true. (Note 16)
In geometry, for example, when we wish to prove
something about all triangles, we draw a
particular triangle and reason about it, taking
care not to use any characteristic which it does
not share with other triangles. The beginner, in
order to avoid error, often finds it useful to
draw several triangles, as unlike each other as
possible, in order to make sure that his reasoning
is equally applicable to all of them. But a
difficulty emerges as soon as we ask ourselves how
we know that a thing is white or a triangle. If we wish to avoid the
universals whiteness and triangularity, we
shall choose some particular patch of white or
some particular triangle, and say that
anything is white or a triangle if it has the
right sort of resemblance to our chosen
particular. But then the resemblance required
will have to be a universal. Since there are
many white things, the resemblance must hold
between many pairs of particular white things;
and this is the characteristic of a universal.
It will be useless to say that there is a
different resemblance for each pair, for then
we shall have to say that these resemblances
resemble each other, and thus at last we shall
be forced to admit resemblance as a universal.
The relation of resemblance, therefore, must
be a true universal. And having been forced to
admit this universal, we find that it is no
longer worth while to invent difficult and
unplausible theories to avoid the admission of
such universals as whiteness and
triangularity. (Note 17)
Berkeley and Hume
failed to perceive this refutation of their
rejection of 'abstract ideas', because, like their
adversaries, they only thought of qualities,
and altogether ignored relations as
universals. We have therefore here another
respect in which the rationalists appear to
have been in the right as against the
empiricists, although, owing to the neglect or
denial of relations, the deductions made by
rationalists were, if anything, more apt to be
mistaken than those made by empiricists.
(Note
18)
Having now seen that there
must be such entities as universals, the next
point to be proved is that their being is not
merely mental. By this is meant that whatever
being belongs to them is independent of their
being thought of or in any way apprehended by
minds. (Note 19)
We have already touched on this subject at the end
of the preceding chapter, but we must now consider
more fully what sort of being it is that belongs
universals.
Consider such a
proposition as 'Edinburgh is north London'. Here
we have a relation between two places, and it
seems plain that the relation subsists
independently of our knowledge of it. When we come
to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come
to know something which has to do only with
Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of
the proposition by coming to know it, on the
contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was
there before we knew it. The part of the earth's
surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of
the part where London stands, even if there were
no human being to know about north and south, and
even if there were no minds at all in the
universe. This is, of course, denied by many
philosophers, either for Berkeley's reasons or for
Kant's. But we have already considered these
reasons, and decided that they are inadequate. We
may therefore now assume it to be true that
nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that
Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact
involves the relation 'north of', which is a
universal; and it would be impossible for the
whole fact to involve nothing mental if the
relation 'north of', which is a constituent part
of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we
must admit that the relation, like the terms it
relates, is not dependent upon thought, but
belongs to the independent world which thought
apprehends but does not create.(Note 20)
This
conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that
the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist
in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London
exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this
relation exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and
nowhen'. (Note 21)There
is no place or time where we can find the relation
'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any
more than in London, for it relates the two and is
neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it
exists at any particular time. Now everything that
can be apprehended by the senses or by
introspection exists at some particular time.
Hence the relation 'north of' is radically
different from such things. It is neither in space
nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it
is something. (Note 22)
It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that
belongs to universals which has led many people to
suppose that they are really mental. (Note 23)We
can think of a universal, and our
thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary
sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for
example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in
one sense it may be said that whiteness is
'in our mind'. We have here the same ambiguity as
we noted in discussing Berkeley in Chapter IV. In
the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in
our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. (Note 24)
The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which
we noted at the same time, also causes confusion
here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense
in which it denotes the object of an act
of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the
ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to
think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other
sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to
think that whiteness is mental. But in so
thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of
universality. One man's act of thought is
necessarily a different thing from another man's;
one man's act of thought at one time is
necessarily a different thing from the same man's
act of thought at another time. (Note 25)
Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to
its object, no two different men could think of
it, and no one man could think of it twice. That
which many different thoughts of whiteness have in
common is their object, and this object
is different from all of them. Thus universals are
not thoughts, though when known they are the
objects of thoughts. (Note 26)
We shall find it convenient
only to speak of things existing
when they are in time, that is to say, when we
can point to some time at which they exist
(not excluding the possibility of their
existing at all times). Thus thoughts and
feelings, minds and physical objects exist.
But universals do not exist in this sense; we
shall say that they subsist or have
being, where 'being' is opposed to
'existence' as being timeless. (Note 27)
The world of universals, therefore, may also be
described as the world of being. The world of
being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to
the mathematician, the logician, the builder of
metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection
more than life. (Note 28)
The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without
sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or
arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and
feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical
objects, everything that can do either good or
harm, everything that makes any difference to the
value of life and the world. According to our
temperaments, we shall prefer the contemplation of
the one or of the other. The one we do not prefer will
probably seem to us a pale shadow of the one
we prefer, and hardly worthy to be regarded as
in any sense real. But the truth is that both
have the same claim on our impartial
attention, both are real, and both are
important to the metaphysician. (Note 29)
Indeed no sooner have we distinguished the two
worlds than it becomes necessary to consider their
relations.
But first of all we
must examine our knowledge of universals. This
consideration will occupy us in the following
chapter, where we shall find that it solves the
problem of a priori knowledge, from
which we were first led to consider universals.
