It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason as Kant styled them, that have this  feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe.

All sorts of higher abstractionsbring with them the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from Emersonwhich I read at my last lecture. The whole

universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims,not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe ofabstract

ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength,

significance, justice, soak throughall things good, strong, significant, and just.

Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts, the fountain-headof all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its "nature," as

we call it, to every special thing.

Everything we know is "what" it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We cannever look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless

and footless, but we grasp allother things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessnessin just so far forth as we might

lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs andpredicates and heads of classification and conception.

This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal facts in ourhuman constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn

towards them and fromthem, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concretebeings. And beings they are, beings as real in the

realm which they inhabit as the changing thingsof sense are in the realm of space.

Posted by: felicity520 at 04:18 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 295 words, total size 2 kb.