of the concrete universal; however, he perhaps did not express himself in
these terms because he accepted a simpler set of categories than Hegel, and
so did not adopt the distinction between property universals and substance
universal on which (as we have seen) Hegel’s distinction between abstract
and concrete universals is based.
95
As a final example, we can briefly consider one of the later Idealists,
Brand Blanshard.
96
In Chapters XVI and XVII of The Nature of Thought,
Blanshard also criticizes the abstractionist picture of general ideas, in a way
that is now familiar:
It is often said that we reach such ideas by ‘abstracting from particular things
what they have in common’. But we have seen that these ‘particular things’ are
from the beginning more than particulars, that even to perceive a thing is to
perceive it as something, and hence to use the very generality supposed to be
reached by later abstraction.
97
However, if it is only as a thing of a certain type that the individual can be
perceived, and that type is a universal, how is this compatible with the
individuality of the thing? This problem arises, Blanshard argues, if the
universal is treated as ‘an element that remains precisely the same through
all its instances, an element that, like a Ford part, can be removed from one
context and used in another without the slightest modification’,
98
in the
manner of an abstract universal. Against this, however, Blanshard argues
that the universal can be concrete, by which he means that it can retain its
identity even while being particularized in one way rather than another, and
that nothing more than this is required to constitute the individual:
The universal, far from being a separable element, is thus so sunk in its
differentiations that without them it would be nothing. The converse relation
95
As Geach observes:
McTaggart accepted from the contemporary Cambridge jargon a simple dichotomy of
characteristics into qualities and relations: any characteristic expressed by a one-place
predicate is a quality. This is a drastic simplification of the Aristotelian categories,
cutting the list down by omission of several members.
(Truth, Love and Immortality, 48)
96
Similar themes are also to be found in Collingwood: cf. his discussion of ‘the point of view of
concrete thought’ in Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, pp. 159ff.
97
Brand Blanshard, The Nature of Thought, 2 vols (London, 1939) Vol. I, p. 571. Cf. also ibid,
pp. 613–14:
To appropriate means, at the least, to identify, and to identify means to find in
something the embodiment of a universal . . . [I]f the thing did not present itself as the
specification of any universal whatever, if it were a thing of no kind at all, I could not
so much as perceive it. In all knowledge universals are being realized. And to grow in
knowledge is to exchange a more generic grasp for a more specific. It is a movement in
which the indefinite defines itself, the potential realizes itself, the relatively formless
gains body and outline.
98
Ibid., 576.
152 ROBERT STERN
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