num_pages: 144
description: Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE CONCEPT: THE NAME: THE TERM. I. The Concept. We have already explained what are the grounds, on which Logic takes cognizance of the Concept. Considered in isolation, the concept is not an act by which the mind attains truth. It can neither be termed true nor false. But concepts are the material of which our mental acts, true and false, consist. Every judgment of necessity contains two concepts. Hence the treatment of the concept is fundamental in the science of Logic. And in every science it is of vital importance that the primary notions should be accurately grasped. There is truth in that saying of Aristotle's, which in the middle ages had passed into a proverb: What is at the ' beginning but a small error, swells to huge proportions ' at the close. In the first place it is necessary to distinguish carefully between the Concept or intellectual idea properly so called, and the Phantasm or mental picture. Whenever I think of an object, I simultaneously form a sensible picture of it in my imagination. If for instance I judge that ' Fishes' are vertebrate, ' or that ' The sun is round, ' I cannot do so without imagining to myself a sensible representation of a fish, or of the sun. Some- times, indeed, as when I think of some abstract subject, such as ' virtue, ' the image of the mere word ' virtue ' will serve my purpose: but some image is requisite, nor does the intellect ever operate save in Connexion with a phantasm.2 1 De Caelo, I. c. 5. -rb it dpxB luxpbv ir Tjj Teevttj yfrenu Parvus error in principio fit magnus in fine. 1 The term ' phantasm ' (innaaiui) is Aristotle's. Thus in De Anima, III. c. 8, he tells us that when we contemplate any thing, we are forced to contemplate it in conjunction with a phantasm (tram re Stupjj, irtfX.il ...
language: English
title: Principles of Logic
publisher: General Books