ABSTRACTION IN THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTS THE TERM abstraction is the usual expression in medieval philosophical terminology for several

processes distinguished in Aristotle's writings by different terms, viz., aphairesis () and korismos () described in different ways. In all probability, it was Boethius who introduced the Latin abstractio and abstrahere to translate these Greek nouns and the related verbs. The main theories of concept formation in Greek antiquity were those of Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle (Beare, 1906). According to all these theories, sense perception and intellectual cognition have to be distinguished both by their objects and by their nature. For Democritus and the Atomists, knowledge as well as sense perception arises from effluvia of atoms which are continually thrown off from the surfaces of physical objects, and eventually enter the percipient through the various sense organs. Intellectual cognition depends on finer and subtler effluvia. This theory was further developed by the Epicureans. The difference between sense objects and the objects of intellectual cognition were also recognized by Plato but accounted for in a very different way. It is generally assumed that Plato adopted the Heraclitean view that the physical world is in continuous flux so that it never exhibits stable objects for sensory cognition. Because we know, for example, the objects of moral ideals and of mathematics, it was necessary to assume a nonsensory origin of this knowledge. Objects of knowledge really are; objects of sense are perpetually becoming. The objects of intellectual cognition, accordingly, must have been stored up in us from a

previous existence. Knowledge, properly so-called, is reminiscence. As the Platonic Forms are separate from the physical world of flux, the knowledge of Forms can only be suggested by the approximations to them that the physical world is able temporarily to manifest. The theory, which Plato expressly defended in the Meno (81C), Phaedo (73A), and Phaedrus (247C) and nowhere expressly abandoned, is that we possess knowledge of the Forms from a previous existence, and that so-called learning is really reminiscence. Accordingly, we should not expect to find anything like a doctrine of abstraction in Plato's writings. The need for such a doctrine as we find in Aristotle is occasioned by Aristotle's insistence that the Forms of material things are not separate realities, yet we seem to be able to consider them without considering the matter or without considering other concrete features of material things. Separate Forms provide us with difficulties but not with this particular one. Plato's insistence that we are acquainted with objects that are nowhere completely realized in the physical world requires a different account of our knowledge of such objects, and Plato found the theory of reminiscence the only suitable explanation. But if there is no doctrine of abstraction in Plato's works, there are passages which might have suggested the doctrine to his successor, Aristotle. It is sufficient to mention here only the passage in the Phaedrus (249B-C) where it is written that man must needs understand the language of Forms, passing from a plurality of perceptions to a unity gathered together by reasoning (Hackforth, 1952). Since, in the very next sentence, we are informed that this understanding is the recollection of those things which our souls beheld aforetime..., the intention of the passage is clear

enough. But the notion that this unity () is somehow connected with a multitude of perceptions might have been one of the suggestions which led Aristotle to his doctrine of abstraction. It was Aristotle's view that form and matter are joined in physical objects that made a theory of abstraction both possible and necessary: possible because forms otherwise could not be known by way of perception and necessary because now perception is the only immediate source of cognition. Aristotle uses the term abstraction () in connection with the objects of mathematics, which Platonists had held were separate from the material world (Ross, p. 566). Aristotle maintained that these mathematical features were, in fact, inseparable from material things but could be thought of separately. In the Metaphysics (1060a 28-1061b 31) the process is described as follows: in the mathematician's investigations, he takes away everything that is sensible, e.g., weight and lightness, hardness and softness, heat and cold, and all other sensible contrarieties, and leaves only quantity and continuity in one, two, or three dimensions, as well as the affections () of these quantities. Elsewhere (Post. Anal. 81b 3; De anima 431b 12ff.; Nic. Eth. 1142a; De caelo III, 1, 299a 15) we are repeatedly informed that the objects of mathematics are treated as separate but cannot exist separately. It is this formulation which is repeated throughout the subsequent history of abstraction both by those who follow Aristotle and by those who reject his views. A point here is worthy of remark. The authors from Boethius to modern times speak of abstracting forms (both accidental and mathematical) from matter, whereas Aristotle (as Owens has pointed out) in describing mathematical abstraction speaks of taking

away the sensible qualities, and leaving only the quantitative features of physical objects.

002

Although the process of coming to know the universal from repeated perceptions of particulars is not called abstractionAristotle here uses separation ( )there is at least one passage which, indirectly, connects these two activities (Post. Anal. 81b 3). In both these cases, induction () is associated with the process of coming to know the universal, whether mathematical or physical. In the case of mathematical abstraction, it is sometimes indicated that the observed object suggests something which is not actually presented, but the prevailing impression is that the mathematical features are literally in the object, and are discovered by removing from consideration all other sensible qualities. The description of cognition given in De anima and in the Parva naturalia is important for the later development of the doctrine of abstraction as we find it in medieval writers. The forms of sensible objects without their matter enter the soul, so that we know objects by the presence of their forms in consciousness. The form as it exists in the soul is, presumably, numerically

different though specifically the same as the form in the object of perception (De anima III; VIII, 431b 26ff.). The forms of objects existing in the soul are, Aristotle assumes, the fundamental elements of thought which are the referents of the verbal symbols of spoken discourse (De interpretatione, I, 16a 3ff; cf. De anima III, 6, 430a 26-430b 33). So, in many cases at any rate, the general terms of discourse stand for isolable objects of intellectual consideration. There are, however, exceptions to this, the most important of which are the analogical or systematically ambiguous terms of metaphysics. Still, the assumption that verbal terms usually stand for affections of the soul is one of the important ingredients of the doctrine of abstraction which was later developed by the medieval philosophers. There are two doctrines of Aristotle which throw some light on his views about abstraction. One is the contention that human cognition first comprehends the generic features of physical things and only later comes to the specific differentiae (Physica I, 1). The other is the view that the essence of an organism is discovered regressively by first knowing the activities, then the powers, and by subsequently discovering the essence on which such powers depend (De anima II). The former doctrine indicates that there are generic concepts. The latter suggests that the concepts of essences, in the case of those of organisms, are really no more than conjunctions of powers. But the view that an essence is an essential unity obviously conflicts with this, because the coexistence of powers expressed by a conjunction of formulae could not constitute the sort of unity of essence that Aristotle seemed to have had in mind. It is, therefore, difficult to understand exactly how the form of anything comes to exist in the soul as an essential unity.

Two main features, then, characterize Aristotle's view of abstraction: formal aspects of physical reality exist in the soul as separate from matter even though such a separation is impossible in the physical world itself. This is true of generic concepts, of mathematical aspects of things, and, of course, the specific concepts of things. Cognition occurs when a form exists in the soul. That abstraction need not involve any falsification is insisted upon by the medievals, and the first statement of this is to be found in Aristotle. The mathematician is concerned with the shape and size of objects such as the sun or the moon, for example; but he does not consider them as limits of natural bodies, or with any properties of shape or size insofar as they are aspects of physical objects. On the other hand, he separates shape, etc., though without any falsity resulting from such conceptual separation (Physica II, 2, 193b 33ff.). The accounts which have come down concerning the theories of concept-formation of Stoics and Epicureans contain nothing that can properly be described as a theory of abstraction. Neither of these schools accepted the form-matter distinction; they both maintained a materialistic view of nature, and the Stoics, at least, were nominalists in some sense. For the Stoics, the main function of reason was the grasp of the conclusion of demonstrations such as the existence of gods and their providential activity. General notions (), they maintained, are gained by contact or by resemblance; some come from analogy, still others by composition or contrariety. In another testimony, general notions are said to arise by way of enlargement or diminution of what is perceived, or by privation (Diog. Lart. VII, 52-53).

Epicurus and his school, in addition to their atomistic materialism, held that we see, for example, shapes, and think of shapes by virtue of the entrance into the body of something coming from external objects. The effluence of atoms coming from the surfaces of physical objects enters the sense organs and produces images. Universal ideas are stored in the mind so that when, for instance, the word man is heard, it calls up the shape stored in the mind. As all this must reduce to a physical pattern, it is clear that all notions are ultimately derived from perception by contact, analogy, resemblance, or conjunction. None of this can be called abstraction. Since Plotinus rejected the Aristotelian theory of sensory cognition, there is no place for a doctrine of abstraction in his account of our conceptual knowledge

003

(Enneads IV, 6, 1-3). The same remark holds for Augustine. In his account of sensory cognition, the soul suffers no changes from the sense organs, but is essentially active, taking note of changes in the body by a kind of vital attention. Hence there can be no taking

of a form into the soul from physical nature. An abstraction, therefore, is out of the question in his view of perception. The doctrine that the laws of numbers and of wisdom are somehow given to human consciousness by interior illumination from a divine source takes the place of abstraction. As Augustine's views on these and other questions were derived from Plotinus and, indirectly, from Plato, this is to be expected. The commentator, Alexander of Aphrodisias, uses the phrase in describing the process of obtaining any form in consciousness as separated from the material which it determines in the external world, and it is from this source (Alexander, De anima, pp. 107, 34) that Boethius derived his account of abstraction (In Isagogen Porphyrii commenta I, 11). According to Boethius, there are many things which cannot actually be separated but which are separated by the soul and by thoughte.g., no one can actually separate a triangle from its material substratum, but a person can mentally separate the triangle and its properties from matter, and contemplate it. This separation does not involve any falsification because falsification can only occur when something is asserted to exist separately which does not or cannot exist separately. Thus the separation achieved by abstraction is not only not false, but is indispensable to the discovery of truth. This means, we propose, that abstraction provides the concepts which are to be united in affirmative propositions which truly state what characteristics things possess. This account of abstraction follows along lines already laid down by Aristotle and is repeated, with elaborations, by the logicians of the twelfth century. Thus Abelard tells us that, although matter and form

are always together, the mind can consider each separately. Thus abstraction does not falsify because there is no assertion that anything has just the abstracted property and no others. The mind considers only one feature but does not assert its separation in fact from other features. For the thing does not have only it, but the thing is considered only as having it (Logica ingredientibus). John of Salisbury provides a similar account. In abstracting a line or surface, the abstracting intellect does not conceive it as existing apart from matter. Abstraction is simply a contemplation of form without considering its matter even though the form cannot exist without the matter (Metalogicon II, Ch. 20). Again, some things resemble others and the mind abstracts from these particular individuals and con siders only the resemblance. In this way, the concept of man is abstracted from the perceptions of individuals, and the concept of animal from man, horse, etc. (ibid.). Similar views about abstraction are developed by the anonymous author of De intellectibus (cf. V. Cousin, 1859) and it is clear that this general agreement can be accounted for by the fact that all the schoolmen of this period read Boethius, and, perhaps, also by the influence of Abelard. The Arabic translations of Aristotle and some of his earlier Greek commentators made the doctrine of abstraction available to the Islamic and Jewish philosophers. But there were also translations or epitomes of the writings of Plotinus and Proclus and, even when there was no confusion between Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian views, attempts were made to harmonize Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic doctrine. In particular, the Neo-Platonic system of emanations was grafted onto that doctrine of Aristotle which concerned the connection of the Agent Intellect to individual human

cognitive activities. The Active Intellect in Aristotle's psychology was identified with the last Intelligence. In some of these systems, the illuminative activity of the active intellect consists in the radiation of forms into the material world and into the human mind. Attempts to combine this doctrine with the doctrine of abstraction produced strange consequences. In Avicenna's (Ibn Sina, 980-1037) treatises on psychology, for example, there are various degrees of abstraction of forms which correspond to the ascending sequence of cognitive powers, the sensitive, the imaginative, the estimative, and finally the intellective. His account of abstraction of sensible forms seems to conform to the Aristotelian psychology of taking the form of a material object apart from the matter (Avicenna, Psychology, p. 40). But forms which have no embodiment or which are embodied accidentally must be received from the Agent Intellect when the individual human souls have been prepared by the appropriate sense experience to receive these emanations (Avicenna, De anima 5; cf. Al-Ghazali, Metaphysics, pp. 174ff.). This explanation of how we know the nature of qualities and of things thus combines a theory of abstraction properly so-called with a doctrine which accounts for conceptual knowledge by emanations of forms from a suprahuman source. This made it congenial to many of the earlier scholastics of the thirteenth century. Another feature of Avicenna's views must be mentioned: the doctrine of distinctions. This became important for the scholastics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and figures in the discussions of the seventeenth century. One of the important sources is

004

Aristotle's statement in the Topics that if one thing is capable of existing without the other, the former will not be the same as the latter (Topics Book VII, Ch. 2; Becker, p. 152 b34). This was taken to be the test of a real distinction of two things. According to Avicenna, that which is asserted is other than that which is not asserted, and what is conceded is different from what is not conceded (De anima I, 1). So, if someone can assert or concede that he exists even though he does not assert or admit that his body exists, this is sufficient ground for holding a real distinction between the mind and the body. A similar idea underlies Descartes' mind-body distinction as a consequence of cogito, ergo sum. Yet another aspect of Avicenna's thought, important to the history of abstraction, is his doctrine of the common nature. Although Avicenna vehemently denies that universals have any extra-mental existence and although he asseverates that individuals alone exist, he maintains that a nature can be contemplated which, in itself, is neither one nor many (numerically) but is simply the nature that it intrinsically is: horseness is simply horseness. This theory of natures was to be used

by the thirteenth-century scholastics in diverse ways. Aquinas draws upon it to avoid the Platonic paradox about the one and the many in his De ente et essentia, and it is essential to the views of Duns Scotus. According to the latter, the common nature has a unity less than numerical unity so that the paradox of one nature or form in many individuals is again avoided. And it continues to receive support in the fourteenth century in the critique of Ockham by Richard of Campsall: Illa natura... non est pleures nec una (Logica, Ch. 15). This theory that a nature as such is neither one nor many is essential to Scotus' doctrine of abstraction. For although such a nature cannot be separated, even by divine power, from the individual differences by which each thing is individuated, it can nonetheless be considered apart from such individuating features by abstraction. Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) criticized Avicenna's view of abstraction along lines which immediately call to mind similar criticisms made later by some fourteenthcentury nominalists (especially Ockham) and by some of the nominalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (especially Hobbes and Berkeley). Against the view that the intelligible universal in the intellect is divested of all specifying or individuating determinations, Al-Ghazali urges that everything in the intellect is derived from the senses and retains all the concrete determinateness of sense experience. True, the intellect can separate parts of a composite, but each part thus separated is just as individual as was the aggregate from which it was separated. Each wholly determinate part of an aggregate thus separated functions as a universal insofar as it is conceived as standing in a relation to all similar individuals, and serves as an image for all other things similar to it (Tahafut..., 1958; cf. Averros, Tahafut, 1954). Al-Ghazali may,

therefore, be regarded as a precursor of the sort of criticism of abstraction which later nominalists in Christendom were to exploit. There is, of course, no likelihood of any literary influence because this part of Al-Ghazali was not accessible in Latin until the sixteenth century (Zedler, 1961). Moreover, Averros opposed Al-Ghazali on this point and continued to uphold the Aristotelian doctrine. We find that Maimonides (1135-1204) also adheres to a doctrine of abstraction derived mostly from Avicenna's Guide of the Perplexed. In the philosophical writings of the early thirteenth century in Christendom attempts were made to accommodate the views of Aristotle to those of Saint Augustine. Avicenna's writings on psychology made this accommodation feasible especially to the Franciscans. But we should glance at one of the first attempts in this vein by Robert Grosseteste. In his commentary on the Posterior Analytics, Grosseteste taught that the mind is capable of knowledge without the aid of the senses. Due to its incarceration in the body, however, the mind is darkened and requires the aid of sensation. Accordingly, abstraction of forms from the data of sensation is normally required. So the intellect separates out for special consideration the features of things which are confused in sensation. Abstraction of forms usually is derived from many individual objects presented to the senses. But the knowledge thus attained is not of the highest grade. A representative view of the Franciscans can be found in Matthew of Aquasparta. Because the human soul is a sort of mean between God and creatures, it has two aspects, one of which, the superior part, is turned to God; the other, the inferior part, is turned

toward creatures. According to the doctrine of the two faces of the soul, the correct explanation of human knowledge is a medium between the position of Augustine and Aristotle. Knowledge of the world is generated in man by sensation, memory, and experience from which the universal concepts of art and science are derived. But in order fully to understand the natures of things thus abstracted from sensation we require an illumination from the Divine Light. Although we do not see Divine Light in our earthly existence, we see the natures of things by its means. The existence of this illumination is explained as follows: we know eternal truths with certainty. These truths are immutable yet everything

005

in the world about us and our very minds are mutable. So, the immutable and necessary features of our knowledge require the illumination of the Divine Light.

Matthew adopts the Augustinian theory that the corporeal world cannot produce changes in the soul (the inferior cannot affect the superior). Rather the soul is actively aware of changes occurring anywhere in the body. The data which the soul makes from its notice of corporeal changes are rendered intelligible by the Agent Intellect which, Matthew says, is what Aristotle calls abstractions. But these abstractions are understood in the light of the immutable rules provided by divine illumination. This combination of abstraction and illumination is to be found in a number of Franciscan thinkers of the thirteenth century. Saint Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas expounds a theory of abstraction according to which things (in the sense of objects of apprehension) can be considered, one aspect apart from another, in cases in which the two things cannot exist separated from one another. In cases in which one thing can exist apart from another we should speak of separation rather than abstraction (Commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate, Q5, a.3). Since substance, which is the intelligible matter of quantity, can exist without quantity, it is possible to consider substance without quantity. Again, to consider animal without considering stone is not to abstract animal from stone. Thus it is only in cases where things cannot exist separately but can be considered separately that we can properly speak of abstraction. Abstraction is of two kinds: the one, mathematical abstraction, involves a consideration of form from sensible matter. The other is the abstraction of the universal from the particular. The possibility of abstraction depends on the fact that things (features of things) exist in one way in the realm of matter, but in another in an intellect which apprehends them. Thus, because the mind is immaterial, the natures of material things exist in the mind in a way suitable to the mind, i.e., they have an immaterial existence in the mind. But the

simple apprehension of the mind does not involve any assertion that the features of things exist thus in reality, because simple apprehension is not an act which asserts or denies anything at all. The mathematical abstraction which considers only the quantitative features of physical things does not assert that lines, planes, etc., exist independently of such objects. It merely considers these features without attending to other aspects of physical objects, although the mathematical or quantitative features cannot exist isolated from physical objects. In the case of the abstraction of the universal from particulars, the mind considers the specific nature of, say, man or dog, apart from the individuating aspects of individual men or dogs. Again, abstrahentium non est mendacium (abstraction is not falsification) because the mind does not assert that the specific nature of man can exist apart from particular men. The generic nature common to several species can be abstracted so that the mind thinks only of the generic aspect of these several species and ignores the specific differences. What is joined in reality, the intellect can at times receive separately, when one of the elements is not included in the notion of the other (Summa contra gentiles I, c. 54, para. 3). So, because the concept of the genus animal does not explicitly contain the concept of, say, rational, the mind can consider animal without considering any particular kind of animal. But this animal is not something existing apart from particular kinds of animal any more than these particular kinds can exist apart from individual animals. Only in the mind that apprehends the form of animal stripped of its individuating and specifying characteristics does animal as such exist (ibid., I, c. 26, para. 5).

Nothing exists in a genus which does not exist in some species of that genus (ibid., I, c. 25, para. 2). Animal cannot exist in re without the differentia rational or the differentia irrational. Still animal can be considered without these differentiae (ibid., I, c. 26, para. 11). There is, however, no purely generic exemplar in the divine mind (Summa theol. I, 15a. 3 ad 4). Duns Scotus adopted from Avicenna the doctrine of a common nature which is in itself neither one nor many but simply what is indicated in the definition or description of such a nature. This nature can be individuated in the individuals of a species by the further determination of an individual difference or haecceity (i.e., thisness in contrast to quiddity or whatness), or it can be rendered a universal concept by the action of the active intellect; but in itself it is neither one nor many. The process of abstracting a universal concept from the common nature so conceived is not a real action because the common nature is already present in the individuals and formally distinguished from the individual differences prior to and independent of any action of the intellect (Duns Scotus, Quaestiones in metaphyisicorum libros, VII, q. 18; Opus oxoniense II d. 1, q. 5 [q. 6], n. 5). This formal distinction of the specific nature from the individual differences which contract it to a numerical unity in the various individuals of the species applies just as well to the distinction between the specific and the generic features of a common nature, for these also are formally distinct in such a way that the mind can think of the generic nature as such. There is, therefore, no distortion or falsification in the result of abstraction, because abstrac-

006

tion amounts to considering one aspect of a nature without considering the others (Opus oxon. III, d. 14, q. 2, n. 12). Thus, the distinctive feature of Scotus' contribution to the doctrine of abstraction depends upon his doctrine of the formal distinction between the individuating and the common nature which exists prior to any action of mind on the data of observation. William of Ockham. Ockham uses the term abstraction and provides a number of meanings for it, but he departs from his predecessors on one very important point: he denies that we can think as separate what is incapable of existing separately in reality. However, he allows that we can understand one thing without understanding another at the same time even though the two things do, in fact, coexist. Thus he states To abstract is to understand one thing without understanding another at the same time even though in reality the one is not separated from the other, e.g., sometimes the intellect understands the whiteness which is in milk and does not understand the sweetness of milk. Abstraction in this sense can belong even to a sense, for a sense can apprehend one sensible without

apprehending another (Expositio physicorum, fol. 111c). In his commentary on the Sentences (II, qq. 14, 15 xx) Ockham tells us that the abstraction of the agent intellect is twofold. On the one hand, it produces a thought (an intellection) which is either intuitive or abstractive, is wholly abstracted from matter because it is immaterial in itself, and has its existence in something immaterial (i.e., in the soul). On the other hand, the abstraction produces a universal, i.e., a universal concept of a thing in representative existence. In still another sense, abstraction occurs when one predicable is predicated of a subject and another predicable is not predicable of that subject even though the latter predicable applies to the subject. This takes place in mathematics. For the mathematician considers only such statements as Every body is divisible, is so long and so deep, and ignores statements about bodies which pertain to motion, to the composition of matter and form in physical things, etc. Accordingly, Ockham allows that many things are really distinct which constitute a unity, as in the case of matter and form, or substance and accident. Now it is true that, in such cases, the mind can separate or divide these from one another so as to understand one and not understand the other. But if a and b are one thing and a may not be really distinguished from b, it is impossible that the mind may divide a from b so as to understand either without understanding the other (Sent. I, d. 2, q. 3, H). Hence, Ockham rejects any abstraction of a common nature or form from its instances in such a way that the mind can contemplate the common nature as such. The only distinction Ockham will allow is the real distinction of one thing from another thing. A distinc-

tion between the common nature and an individual difference which Scotus had defended is, for Ockham, entirely out of the question (Sent. I d, qq. 1-4). The reason why Ockham can allow the abstraction of matter and form in an individual physical object is because, for him, this matter and this form could exist apart from one another, at least by divine power. The same is true of accident and substance. An accident can be thought without its substratum because an accident and its substratum are two really distinct things, and one can exist without the other (Sent. II, q. 5, M; cf. I, d. 30, q. 1, P). Thus Ockham, as Vignaux observed, adopted the principle, much later exploited by Hume, that whatever is distinguishable is separable. And like Hume, he practically rejected the distinction of reason. The result was a rejection of the central tenet of the classical doctrine of abstraction, set forth by Aristotle and defended, in one form or another, by many of the scholastics of the twelfth and later centuries. Descartes. There were many elaborations of the Thomistic doctrine among the later scholastics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Cajetan, Suarez, John of St. Thomas and others. Suarez in particular, was responsible for sharpening the differences between abstraction and distinction (or separation as Saint Thomas had called it). And this, in turn, was almost certainly the immediate source of Descartes' views. While Descartes allows that abstraction takes place in the mind, he is always at pains to notice that abstraction renders our concepts inadequate in such a way that we cannot discover the important distinction of things. Thus, the distinction of reason by which a substance is distinguished from its principal attribute (of thought or extension as the case may be) is effected

by abstracting one from the other. This is accomplished only with some difficulty and the result does not correspond with anything in the way of a real separation of a substance from its nature or attribute (Principles of Philosophy, I, 63). Thus the valuable operation of the mind is that which provides us with a real distinction. This Descartes sometimes calls exclusion. The principal difference which Descartes makes between abstraction and exclusion is that, in the case of abstraction we consider one thing without considering that from which abstraction has been made and so may not be aware that abstraction has rendered a concept inadequate, whereas in distinguishing one thing from another, we must keep both clearly before us. Considering an abstraction by itself prevents us from knowing

007

well what it has been abstracted from (Letter to Clerselier, 12 Jan. 1646). The influence of Descartes on the so-called PortRoyal Logic of Antoine Arnauld (1612-94) is obvious. But this famous treatise presents an account of abstrac-

tion which agrees in essential features with the standard medieval view. Arnauld had argued, in his critique of Descartes, that the genus can be conceived without conceiving its species so that, for example, one can conceive figure without conceiving any of the characteristics proper to such a particular figure as a circle (Fourth Objections). Again, length can be conceived without breadth or depth. But such abstraction, properly so-called, is only between aspects of things which are only distinct by a distinction of reason. Where things really distinct are distinguished, abstraction does not occur (La Logique ou l'art de penser [1662], Part I, Ch. 5). John Locke. The discussion of abstraction which is perhaps most familiar to modern readers is to be found in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas; and ideas become general by separating from them the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence. By this way of abstraction they are made capable of representing more individuals than one; each of which having in it a conformity to that abstract idea, is (as we call it) of that sort

(Book III, Ch. 3, para. 6). He goes on to suggest immediately that nothing new is introduced in this process but that it is rather a process of omitting all individuating features, and retaining only what is common to all of a set of resembling particulars. This omission, he explains elsewhere (Book II, Ch. 13, para. 13), is a kind of partial consideration which does not imply a separation. But Locke applies the notion of abstraction to cases which go beyond the mere omission of particular spatiotemporal determinations. In the famous example of forming the

general idea of a triangle, Locke says that this idea of triangle in general is something imperfect that cannot exist, an idea wherein some parts of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together (Book IV, Ch. 7, para. 9). Whatever Locke may have thought this putting together amounted to, it is certainly not achieved simply by omitting particularizing features of several particular triangles. The fact is that no single doctrine of abstraction can be found in Locke, as I. A. Aaron has shown (Aaron, 1937). Berkeley and Hume. Berkeley's critique of abstraction proceeds along lines which were relatively new to his readers but which had already been worked out by Al-Ghazali in the eleventh century and even by Ockham in the fourteenth century. If two things (in Berkeley's philosophy, of course, two ideas) can exist separately, the mind can abstract one from the other. But if it is granted that two things cannot exist one apart from the other, i.e., that there would be a contradiction if a were supposed to exist without b (or conversely), the mind cannot think of a without b or of b without a. To argue otherwise would be to attribute to the human mind a power which not even God can be supposed to have or exercise. Hume adopted Berkeley's critique and elaborated a positive theory of the function of general terms which goes beyond Berkeley. Although every idea is particular, some ideas can function as general ones by being associated with a name of a number of particulars which resemble one another exactly or only approximately. In the latter case, the name is associated with a number of qualitatively different but resembling images. One of these associated images will be dominant, the others relatively recessive but, as Hume puts it, present in power to be recalled by design or necessity. Thus, although a red image may be recalled when the word color is pronounced, heard, read, or re-

called, other color-images less strongly associated with the word color tend to appear in consciousness, are present in power, and will be recalled if there is danger of a mistakenly narrow use of color presenting itself. This then, is Hume's alternative to the doctrine that there are either genuine images or abstract general ideas. The traditional explanation of the origin of abstract concepts persisted, with some modifications, among the philosophers of the eighteenth century. A considerable advance in the understanding of the nature and function of concepts seems to have been made by Immanuel Kant. The verb, adjective, and noun frequently occur in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Werke, A54, A70 [B95], A76, A96) without any special explanation. But Kant's doctrine of pure as well as a posteriori concepts leaves no doubt that abstraction alone cannot account for the existence or employment of concepts (Werke, VII, 400-01). The form of a concept, as a discursive representation is always constructed. As Kant puts it in the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (para. 20), empirical concepts would not be possible unless a pure concept were added to the particular concept which has been abstracted from intuition. And, finally, in the Critique of Pure Reason, the concept is presented as a rule by means of which the imagination can outline, for example, the figure of a certain quadruped (say, a dog) without limiting it to such a determinate figure as one's experience or concrete images might present. Kant calls this a schema. Without such a schema (which is an application of the pure concepts of the under-

008

standing) neither images nor a conceptualization of images would be possible. Kant's doctrine that pure concepts, i.e., the categories of the understanding, be at the basis of all conceptual thinking thus makes the process of abstraction subsidiary to and dependent upon faculties which are logically prior to any process of abstraction from empirical data. As more than one writer has recently pointed out, empirical concepts are more like dispositions than like static constituents of consciousness. There is, however, no suggestion in Kant that abstraction does not occur. That this new view of the activities of the mind would require an entirely different account of abstraction is not made very plain in Kant's writings. In the development of metaphysical Idealism in the post-Kantian philosophers, the notion of abstraction becomes very general, so general in fact that the original meanings of the term seem almost lost. What makes the matter even more difficult to discuss is the fact that, among these Idealists, any separation or isolation of one content or feature of experience or thought from another is condemned as falsification, so that to abstract, abstract, abstraction, all acquire a pejorative sense. To separate the cognizing subject from its object, to attend to one discriminable element apart from its surrounding, and the like, are all condemned as falsifications of reality. This condemnation rests on

the Hegelian doctrine that the Truth is the Whole, i.e., that all aspects of thought and reality are dialectically interconnected. Other more significant attacks on the doctrine that general concepts result from abstraction come from Husserl's thorough critique of Locke and his eighteenth-century critics. While insisting on the absurdity of Locke's doctrine, Husserl attacked with equal vehemence the theories of Berkeley, Hume, and Mill. He insisted that the general attributes are given to consciousness initially, and thus repudiated the traditional doctrine of abstraction. There are similar views to be found in some of the writings of Whitehead and Santayana. The eternal objects of Whitehead and the essences of Santayana are supposed to be discoveries rather than constructions; they are not the results of creations of mental activities, and thus are not the result of abstraction as it was traditionally expounded, although the accounts of abstraction in terms of attention and comparisons would be consistent with such views. One of the most significant critiques of abstraction comes from Gottlob Frege, in his Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884). While Frege appears to allow that color, weight, and hardness are abstracted from objects, he holds that number is not so abstracted. His theory of the concept of cardinal number makes it impossible to obtain the number concept by simply omitting features of empirically accessible objects. Because a number is a property of properties, it is not available from empirical inspection of individuals. And if we examine Frege's definitions of particular finite cardinals we see at once why the notion of cardinal numbers can hardly be extracted as traditional abstraction doctrines suggest. The number one, for example, is a characteristic of any property F which

satisfies the following condition: there is that which is F and which is the same as anything which is F, more exactly: (x)(Fx(y)(Fy. . y = x). It is readily seen, if we remove the expression F from the above formula thus obtaining (x). (x. (y) y. . y = x, that the property of F is expressible solely in terms of logical constants. Now because these constants function in discourse in a manner that is not comparable with the way indicative or descriptive expressions function, it is hardly surprising that there is nothing available empirically from which they can be abstracted or upon which attention may be concentrated. A psychological account of the origin of the notion of number will doubtless be a very complicated affair but it will necessarily be radically different from abstraction. The technique employed by Frege, Georg Cantor, and some others to elucidate the mathematical notions of cardinal number was recognized by Bertrand Russell as an application of a general principle which Russell called the principle of abstraction. But he added that it would have been better called the principle for the avoidance of abstraction. The principle is this: for any relation S which is transitive and symmetrical there is a relation R which is a many-one relation such that whenever xSy, there is a unique term z such that xRz and yRz; conversely, if there is a many-one relation R such that there is a unique term z so that xRz and yRz, there is a relation S which is transitive and symmetrical (Principia Mathematica, Vol. 1, 72). The essential principle to notice here is that, instead of attempting to account for the concept by a psychological theory by which the concept is derived somehow from the data of the senses or from some innate or at least internal feature of human consciousness, the concept is constructed by logical means from fairly

simple relational concepts. Thus, a cardinal number is defined as either a class of those classes whose numbers can be bi-uniquely correlated (in a one to one correspondence) with one another, or, as a property P of those properties q1, q2,..., qr such that those things having any one of these properties can be correlated bi-uniquely with the things having any other of these properties. The formal definition of cardinal number brings into

009

prominence the fact that it is constructed by means of variables ranging over individuals and properties, and by logical connectives and quantifiers. There is nothing about such a construction which even suggests that it could have been abstracted (in the traditional sense) from sense given materials or that there is some inner source of the notion. It can be objected to all this that this logical construction of concepts of cardinal and ordinal numbers does not explain their psychological origin. Doubtless this is correct. Frege and Russell probably both supposed that they were elucidating the nature of mathematical objects which are

somehow given (in some very different way from abstraction), whereas they were actually recommending the replacement of obscure notions by clear ones. But whatever the psychological origin of mathematical concepts may be, the Frege-Russell construction shows that it must be far more complex than anything proposed by the traditional abstraction theories. So, while the psychological question remains a highly interesting one, the focus of interest has shifted to the logical content of formal concepts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
For main developments in Greek thought, see J. I. Beare, Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition (Oxford, 1906). See also Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library (London and New York, 1925), esp. VII, 52-53; R. Hackforth, Plato's Phaedrus (Cambridge, 1952), p. 86; Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics, 2nd ed. (Toronto, 1963); W. D. Ross, Aristotle's Prior and Posterior Analytics (Oxford, 1949), p. 566. For Alexander of Aphrodisias, see his De anima (Berlin, 1887), pp. 107, 34. Boethius is found in In Isagogen Porphyrii Commenta, Corpus Scriptorem Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vol. XLVIII (Vienna, 1906), 135-69; also Quomodo substantiae in eo quod sint bonae sint cum non sint substantialia bona (London, 1928), pp. 44-45; and in De Trinitate (London, 1928), Q5, a. 3. The sources for medieval figures include: Abelard, Logica ingredientibus, ed. B. Geyer, Beitrge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Band XXI (Mnster in W., 1921), Heft L, 25; and P. Abelardi opera hactenus inedita, ed. V. Cousin (Paris, 1849; Vol. II, 1859), II, 733-45; AlGhazali, Algazal's Metaphysics, ed. J. T. Muckle (Toronto, 1933), Part II (IV, 5), pp. 174ff.; and Tahafut Al-Falasifah

(Destruction of the Philosophers), trans. S. A. Kameli (Lahore, 1958), pp. 218-20; Averros, Tahafut, trans. S. van der Bergh (London, 1954), pp. 345-55; Avicenna, Psychology, trans. F. Rahman (Oxford, 1952), p. 40, also De anima (Venice, 1508), I, 1 and V, 5; Duns Scotus, Quaestiones in metaphysicorum libros (Lyon, 1639), VII, q. 18, also Opus oxoniense (Lyon, 1639), and Sentences (Lyon, 1639); John of Salisbury, Metalogicon (Berkeley, 1955), II, Ch. 20; Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago, 1963), Part I, Ch. 68, pp. 163-64; J. R. O'Donnell, ed., Nine Medieval Thinkers (Toronto, 1955), p. 191, is the source for Richard of Campsall. For Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, the standard Latin text is edited by Leonina Manvalis (Rome, 1946), and an English translation is that by Anton Pegis et al. (Garden City, N.Y., 1955-56); for Summa theologica, the standard Latin text is edited by M. E. Marietti (Turin, 1952), and an English version is Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton Pegis (New York, 1945). See also Beatrice H. Zedler, ed., Averros Destructio destructionum (Milwaukee, 1961), pp. 18-31. Since the Renaissance, principal sources include I. A. Aaron, John Locke (Oxford, 1937), pp. 194-200; A. Arnauld, La Logique, ou l'art de penser, 5th ed. (Paris, 1683), Part I, Ch. 5; Ren Descartes, Letter to P. Mesland, 2 May 1644, Principles of Philosophy, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 12 vols. (Paris, 1897-1913; 1964), I, 63 and VIII, 31. See also Replies to First Objections, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris, 1964), VII, 120, and Quartae objectiones, in the Haldane and Ross translation (Cambridge, 1912), II, 82; John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690), Book III, Ch. 3, para. 6. I. A; Immanuel Kant, Werke, ed. E. Cassirer, 11 vols. (Berlin, 1912-22), VII, 400-01; idem, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Leipzig, 1924), A, 1781, B, 1787; H. Scholz and H. Schweitzer, Die sogenannte Definitionen durch Abstraktion (Leipzig, 1935).

JULIUS WEINBERG [See also Analogy; Axiomatization; Experimental Science; Islamic Conception; Number; Optics and Vision; Organicism; Platonism; Rationality.] Dictionary of the History of Ideas