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ideas, concepts, and reality
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 1 2013-02-05 12:36:27

McGill-Queen’s studies in the History of ideas
series editor: philip J. cercone
1 problems of cartesianism 11 scottish common sense

Edited by Thomas M. Lennon, in Germany, 1768–1800:
John M. Nicholas, and John a contribution to the
W. Davis History of critical philosophy
Manfred Kuehn
2 the development of the idea
of History in antiquity 12 paine and cobbett:
Gerald A. Press the transatlantic connection
David A. Wilson
3 claude Buffier and thomas reid:
two common-sense philosophers 13 descartes and the enlightenment
Louise Marcil-Lacoste Peter A. Schouls
4 schiller, Hegel, and Marx: 14 Greek scepticism: anti-realist
state, society, and the aesthetic trends in ancient thought
ideal of ancient Greece Leo Groarke
Philip J. Kain
15 the irony of theology and the
5 John case and aristotelianism nature of religious thought
in renaissance england Donald Wiebe
Charles B. Schmitt
16 Form and transformation:
6 Beyond liberty and property: a study in the philosophy
the process of self-recognition of plotinus
in eighteenth-century political Frederic M. Schroeder
thought
17 From personal duties
J.A.W. Gunn
towards personal rights:
7 John toland: His Methods, late Medieval and early
Manners, and Mind Modern political thought,
Stephen H. Daniel c. 1300–c. 1650
Arthur P. Monahan
8 coleridge and the inspired Word
Anthony John Harding 18 the Main philosophical
Writings and the novel Allwill
9 the Jena system, 1804–5:
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
logic and Metaphysics
Translated and edited by
G.W.F. Hegel
George di Giovanni
Translation edited by John W. Burbidge
and George di Giovanni 19 Kierkegaard as Humanist:
Introduction and notes by discovering My self
H.S. Harris Arnold B. Come
10 consent, coercion, and limit: 20 durkheim, Morals, and
the Medieval origins of Modernity
parliamentary democracy W. Watts Miller
Arthur P. Monahan
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 2 2013-02-05 12:36:27

21 the career of toleration: 32 orthodoxy and enlightenment:
John locke, Jonas proast, George campbell in
and after the eighteenth century
Richard Vernon Jeffrey M. Suderman
22 dialectic of love: platonism 33 contemplation and incarnation:
in schiller’s aesthetics the theology of Marie-
David Pugh dominique chenu
Christophe F. Potworowski
23 History and Memory
in ancient Greece 34 democratic legitimacy:
Gordon Shrimpton plural Values
and political power
24 Kierkegaard as theologian:
F.M. Barnard
recovering My self
Arnold B. Come 35 Herder on nationality,
Humanity, and History
25 enlightenment and
F.M. Barnard
conservatism in Victorian
scotland: the career of 36 labeling people: French scholars
sir archibald alison on society, race, and empire,
Michael Michie 1815–1849
Martin S. Staum
26 the road to egdon Heath:
the aesthetics of the Great 37 the subaltern appeal to
in nature experience: self-identity,
Richard Bevis late Modernity, and the
politics of immediacy
27 Jena romanticism and its
Craig Ireland
appropriation of Jakob Böhme:
theosophy – Hagiography – 38 the invention of Journalism
literature ethics: the path to objectivity
Paolo Mayer and Beyond
Stephen J.A. Ward
28 enlightenment and community:
lessing, abbt, Herder, and the 39 the recovery of Wonder:
Quest for a German public the new Freedom
Benjamin W. Redekop and the asceticism of power
Kenneth L. Schmitz
29 Jacob Burckhardt and
the crisis of Modernity 40 reason and self-enactment
John R. Hinde in History and politics:
themes and Voices
30 the distant relation:
of Modernity
time and identity in spanish-
F.M. Barnard
american Fiction
Eoin S. Thomson 41 the More Moderate side
of Joseph de Maistre:
31 Mr simson’s Knotty case:
Views on political liberty
divinity, politics, and due process
and political economy
in early eighteenth-century
Cara Camcastle
scotland
Anne Skoczylas
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 3 2013-02-05 12:36:27

42 democratic society 51 archives and the event of God:
and Human needs the impact of Michel Foucault
Jeff Noonan on philosophical theology
David Galston
43 the circle of rights expands:
Modern political thought 52 Between the Queen and the cabby:
after the reformation, 1521 olympe de Gouges’s
(luther) to 1762(rousseau) Rights of Women
Arthur P. Monahan John R. Cole
44 the canadian Founding: 53 nature and nurture in French
John locke and parliament social sciences, 1859–1914
Janet Ajzenstat and Beyond
Martin S. Staum
45 Finding Freedom: Hegel’s
philosophy and the 54 public passion:
emancipation of Women rethinking the Grounds
Sara MacDonald for political Justice
Rebecca Kingston
46 When the French tried
to Be British: party, opposition, 55 rethinking the political:
and the Quest for the civil the sacred, aesthetic politics,
disagreement, 1814–1848 and the collège de sociologie
J.A.W. Gunn Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi
47 Under conrad’s eyes: 56 Materialist ethics and life-Value
the novel as criticism Jeff Noonan
Michael John DiSanto
57 Hegel’s Phenomenology:
48 Media, Memory, and the dialectical Justification
the First World War of philosophy’s First principles
David Williams Ardis B. Collins
49 an aristotelian account 58 the social History of ideas
of induction: creating in Quebec, 1760–1896
something from nothing yvan lamonde
Louis Groarke Translated by Phyllis Aronoff
and Howard Scott
50 social and political Bonds:
a Mosaic of contrast 59 ideas, concepts, and reality
and convergence John W. Burbidge
F.M. Barnard
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 4 2013-02-05 12:36:27

ideas, concepts,
and reality
John W. Burbidge
McGill-Queen’s University press

Montreal & Kingston • london • ithaca
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 5 2013-02-05 12:36:27

© McGill-Queen’s University press 2013
isbn 978-0-7735-4127-6 (cloth)
isbn 978-0-7735-4165-8 (paper)
legal deposit second quarter 2013

Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
printed in canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free

(100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free
this book has been published with the help of a grant from the canadian
Federation for the Humanities and social sciences, through the awards
to scholarly publications program, using funds provided by the social
sciences and Humanities research council of canada.
McGill-Queen’s University press acknowledges the support of the canada

council for the arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge
the financial support of the Government of canada through the canada
Book Fund for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Burbidge, John, 1936–

ideas, concepts, and reality / John W. Burbidge.
(McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas, ISSN 0711-0995)

includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-7735-4127-6 (bound). – isbn 978-0-7735-4165-8 (pbk.)
1. idea (philosophy). 2. concepts. 3. Mind and reality. 4. thought and

thinking. i. title. ii. series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas
b105.i28b87 2013 121'.4 c2012-908101-9
this book was typeset by interscript in 10.5/13 new Baskerville.
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 6 2013-02-05 12:36:27

For Jacob
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25229_BURBIDGE.indb 8 2013-02-05 12:36:27
Contents
prologue 3
P a rt O n e F r o m I d e a s to C o n c e p t s 11
1 Frege and psychologism 13
2 From sensations to ideas: the empiricists 20
3 How ideas emerge: Hegel 31
4 language 39
5 From retentive to Mechanical Memory 48
6 thoughts and descartes’s rules 57
7 second rule: analysis and definition 64
8 third rule: synthesis and Unity 74
9 Fourth rule: comprehensiveness 81
10 conceiving 90
P a rt T wo Tendrils of Thought 97
11 Hegel’s Logic 99
12 syllogisms 107
13 Modus ponens et al. 113
14 arguments from analogy 124
15 linguistic Variations 136
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x Contents
16 ideas and concepts 147

epilogue 154
Acknowledgments 165
Index 167
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ideas, concepts, and reality
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25229_BURBIDGE.indb 2 2013-02-05 12:36:27
Prologue
When we approach the study of logic for the first time, we

encounter a strange paradox. the Oxford Concise Dictionary1 defines
logic as the “science of reasoning, proof, thinking, or inference; …
[a] chain of reasoning, correct or incorrect use of reasoning, ability
in reasoning.” the gerunds2 in the definition – “reasoning” and
“thinking” – suggest the study of certain activities that the intellect or
mind performs. But the sophisticated discipline designated by this
definition makes no mention of mental operations, nor does it nur-
ture skills that would make thinking more effective. rather, it defines
a number of symbols, stipulates how to fit normal thoughts into those
symbols, specifies particular ways of using them, and provides stan-
dards to ensure that an argument (which is now simply a pattern of
such symbols) is valid.3 it rigorously excludes any suggestion of an
actual process of reasoning.
there have been a number of attempts to modify this stark
contrast. Universities have developed courses with such names as
“practical reasoning,” “argumentation,” and “informal logic,” which
concentrate on inferences that do not satisfy formalists’ strict criteria
of validity. these train students to assess the reliability and relevance
of premises, the strength of grounds, and the temptations that arise
1 17th edition, 1982.

2 or verbal nouns.
3 the Oxford English Reference Dictionary (2nd ed. rev., 2003) adds a note to the
above definition: “logic involves the systematic study of the patterns of argument and
in particular of those patterns of argument that are valid.”
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 3 2013-02-05 12:36:27

4 Prologue
from rhetorical devices that sound like good reasons but are in fact
deceptive. and scholars have undertaken much research into the de-
tails of these operations. none the less this whole subdiscipline lives
in the shadow of its more rigorous counterpart – a poor second best
that may be useful at times when strict validity is not possible but
whose imperfections always point towards its perfect prototype. it
is almost as if its contact with the messiness of actual thinking soils
and besmirches it.
this discrepancy between the pure science of logical validity and
the actual processes of human reasoning has many sources. aristotle
was the first to identify certain forms of good reasoning worthy of
investigation irrespective of the content that thought introduces.
and his schema of valid syllogisms, later augmented by the stoic
philosophers, served as the core of all logical studies until the mid-
nineteenth century. But the contrast between form and content be-
came absolute only in the writings of Gottlob Frege.
the British empiricists had tried to explain the logic of human
thought by appealing to experience. they traced inferences back to
associations and grounded them in sensory encounters with the
world. John stuart Mill goes so far as to say that all the calculations of
mathematics are simply the result of inductive generalizations from
experience.4 patterns have recurred so regularly in the past that peo-
ple assume them to be universal and necessary. in a similar vein,
edmund Husserl, in his early Philosophie der Arithmetik, attempts a psy-
chological analysis of basic logical and mathematical notions.
in his review of Husserl’s work, Frege observes that both the em-
piricists and Husserl committed the fallacy of “psychologism.” each
individual has a distinctive psychological itinerary, which is the prod-
uct of his or her particular experiences, interests, and influences.
one cannot base logic or mathematics on such insecure and variable
foundations. so, Frege says, we need to distinguish between two kinds
of mental entities: Vorstellungen, or ideas, and Begriffe, or concepts.
the first are psychological and idiosyncratic; the second are objective
and independent of the minds thinking them.
i use Frege’s German terms for the two kinds of entities, for en-
glish translators have not been consistent when translating them.
4 John stuart Mill, A System of Logic (london: longmans, 1961), Book ii,
chapter vi, 164ff.
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Prologue 5
translations of Kant or the German idealists, for example, render

Vorstellung as “conceptualization,” “picture thinking,” and more re-
cently “representation.” Frege’s translators have adopted the term
“idea” because what he is describing matches almost exactly with
locke, Berkeley, and Hume’s use of that term. Begriff also poses prob-
lems, for the original German has become “notion” and “compre-
hension” as well as “concept.” to provide some consistency, i use the
same terms as Frege’s translators5 and limit “idea” and “concept” to
what he has in mind.
Following Frege’s instructions, modern logic seeks to avoid as
much as possible any psychological fallacy. it looks at concepts, with
their objective independence, and sets aside all ideas, with their per-
sonal associations, for thinking and reasoning are psychological op-
erations and hence liable to subjective distortion. this is the primary
reason for the discrepancy with which we started.
But Frege is not the only one to draw a sharp distinction between
Vorstellungen, or ideas, and Begriffe, or concepts. earlier in the nine-
teenth century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote that “phi-
losophy does nothing but transform ideas into thoughts – although,
of course, it does go on to transform the mere thought into the
concept.”6 But whereas Frege introduces an exclusive opposition,
Hegel suggests that one can actually move, by way of something he
calls thoughts, from mere ideas to concepts. Both operations are to
function within an all-inclusive realm of thinking minds.
in my innocence of Frege’s strictures, i developed an interpreta-
tion of Hegel’s massive and impenetrable Science of Logic, one of the
most difficult texts in the Western philosophical tradition. in this
work, abstract terms tumble out, one after another, in a sequence of
paragraphs where it seems impossible to decipher where he wants us
to start and how he is taking us from one step to the next. yet Hegel
claims that he is developing a philosophical system – indeed, he says,
the Logic is the “system of pure reason.”
5 even though this use of “idea” does not fit easily with plato’s appeal to ideas or
forms as independent of our thoughts.
6 G.W.F. Hegel: Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. t.F. Geraets, W.a. suchting, and
H.s. Harris (indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), §20, remark, 50. i have replaced their
“representation” by “idea” and demoted their “concept” to the more mundane
“concept.”
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 5 2013-02-05 12:36:27

6 Prologue
in an attempt to make some systematic sense of this dense and

abstract prose, i found a clue in Hegel’s description of his Logic as
“thinking about thinking.” the phrase suggests that what he describes
is the way our thoughts develop as they think about such abstract
concepts as “being,” “essence,” or even “conceiving.” He disdains the
use of illustrative examples from experience, because he is focusing
simply on the meaning of the terms being thought. But the thinking
of each concept none the less introduces a dynamic movement that
leads on to others.
so i developed an exposition that adopted, as the interpretive
thread to navigate the labyrinth of Hegel’s difficult work, an analysis
of the way thought functions when it starts to understand concepts.
When we focus our attention on a term to establish its limits, i
claimed, our mind moves and shifts to other, related thoughts.
Because our thinking is plastic enough to consider its own opera-
tions, we can then reflect back on that shift, identify its starting point
and its result, and highlight the process by which thought moves
from one to the other. reflection then brings that complexity togeth-
er into a single focus, introducing a kind of synthesis. and because
our minds are able to integrate that synthesis into a new, unified
thought, we can collapse the complex interplay into another, more
detailed concept, whose meaning or sense is a function of the pro-
cesses through which thought has moved in reaching it. since none
of this required any imaginative correlate, i provided few if any illus-
trations and examples of what i had in mind. indeed, it seemed to me
that examples tended to mislead readers who focus on the images
and their associations and fail to consider the conceptual point illus-
trated. this ability of thought to move without recourse to mental
images from an initial transition or shift through reflection on what
has gone on to new, unified thought, i suggested, underlies the “sys-
tematic” development of Hegel’s Science of Logic.7
not surprising, i was soon attacked for having committed the fal-
lacy of psychologism.8 logical argument, i had claimed, derived from
psychological processes. But these, as subjective, cannot establish the
7 J.W. Burbidge, On Hegel’s Logic: Fragments of a Commentary (atlantic Highlands,

nJ: Humanities, 1981).
8 George di Giovanni, “Burbidge and Hegel on the logic,” Owl of Minerva 14,
no. 1 (sept. 1982), 1–6.
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Prologue 7
objectivity required. For logic, the objection reminded me, con-

cerned itself with validity. and that does not depend on what any
particular person happens to be thinking. Whenever Hegel shows
how one concept leads on to another, he claims that it is the very
meaning of the concept itself that requires the transition, even if no
one has ever actually thought the concept in that form before. to
base logic on various kinds of psychological activity – transitions, re-
flection, conceiving – is to dissolve that reliable universality; logic, far
from emerging from what people actually think, rather sets the stan-
dard against which to measure their individual successes or failures.
any logic worth its salt must be true, irrespective of whatever happens
in the world of physical events and human experience. if we cannot
rely on the absolute reliability of logic’s structure, we have no basis
for determining whether we are progressing or regressing in our un-
derstanding of the changing world in which we live.
the charge is serious. When human beings think, there is no guar-
antee that they will all end up with the same conclusions, even when
they start from the same premises. i recall, for example, the mature
student in my introductory logic class, who had already produced an
academy award–winning short film. He was adept at intuiting the
relationship between a number of visual scenes and situations, and
he started confidently into the first exercise, which involved distin-
guishing arguments from other forms of rhetorical expression. When
we sat down to discuss the answers, however, it turned out that his
answers ran directly counter to the conventional claims of the logical
texts. Whatever the dominant tradition thought to be arguments he
thought simply digressions. and those passages it claimed involved
rhetorical persuasion he identified as arguments. Moreover, i could
not convince him that he was wrong. perhaps he brought a different
context to his reading of the selected passages from that which logi-
cally precise thinkers adopt. perhaps the academic discipline isolated
the passage from any assumed context, whereas he intuited connec-
tions to all kinds of related meanings. in any case, it was clear that his
mind did not make the same moves as mine – that his thinking fol-
lowed a different pattern. the logician in me wanted to claim that
only strict reliance on the meaning of the terms directly involved –
such as “because” and “therefore” – was appropriate to the assign-
ment. if one does not hold to that fundamental “objectivity,” i wanted
to say, then there can be no basis for deciding between reliable and
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 7 2013-02-05 12:36:27

8 Prologue
unreliable conclusions. But in making that response, i could no lon-

ger appeal to the transitions of pure thought, but had to rely on some
standard against which to assess such thinking.
a quick response to this story is that the mature student was work-
ing with representations and ideas, whereas logicians work with con-
cepts. He was drawing on intuitions, associations, and the play of
creative imagination in making his decisions. the logician, in con-
trast, relies simply on the abstract meanings of such terms as “since,”
“as a result,” and “hence” and on their implicit presence in other pas-
sages. the sense of these concepts is not a function of what actually
goes on in anyone’s mind. it is independent and universally valid, in
any culture and in any context. indeed, it continues to hold even if
there were no people to think it at all. it is as if we humans once “dis-
covered” that meaning sometime in our evolutionary history, in the
same way that europeans “discovered” the americas in the fifteenth
century; it is not something that we generate out of the way our minds
happen to operate.
so i could not lightly dismiss the critic’s charge of psychologism
against my interpretive framework. the distinction between ideas
and concepts is fundamental to the development of modern logic.
and even though it is difficult, if not impossible, to translate Hegel’s
massive and incomprehensible text into the formulae and conven-
tions of contemporary logical discussions, whether symbolic or infor-
mal, there can be no doubt that Hegel intended his logic to set an
objective standard against which to measure all the rest of philoso-
phy – indeed all reflective thought. if the interpretive thread that i
had used to decipher his prose implied that the systematic develop-
ment was a function of the way certain people happen to think, then
it could not do justice to what Hegel was about.
so we must return to Frege’s sharp dichotomy between ideas and

concepts. the relative success of my interpretive thread makes me
reluctant to abandon all reference to the processes of conceptual
thinking. However, the evident relativity that marks the way people
actually use their minds, and the independence of such disciplines as
mathematics and theoretical physics from the intellectual processes
of their practitioners in reaching their conclusions, make Frege’s
conclusions hard to avoid. so, in an attempt to resolve this tension,
this study explores the relations between ideas and concepts to see
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 8 2013-02-05 12:36:27

Prologue 9
how they differ and how they both can function none the less within
a single human mind.
it raises a number of questions: can one ever try to understand the
logic of concepts by appealing to the activity of thinking – of conceiv-
ing? indeed, what is the relationship between the noun “concept”
and the verb “conceive”? if concepts have some kind of independent
subsistence, beyond the realm of normal human experience, how is
it possible that we can on occasion apprehend them and examine
them for their implications and interconnections? if, however,
concepts really are the product of a human activity we might call
“conceiving,” how do they acquire their normative role when the hu-
man mind assesses valid and invalid inferences and acquires knowl-
edge of the world? How can human initiatives – despite the obstacles
of subjective distortion and personal interest – ever become refined
enough to reach universal truths?
once we raise these questions, they spill over into a wide range of
current debates in the academy. on one extreme are people who
claim that all reasoning is human and so subjective: there are no uni-
versal truths; each position, even when established by the most disci-
plined scientist, simply reflects the context and conditioning of the
investigator. on the other extreme, most mathematicians and scien-
tists affirm that it is only by relying on the strict objectivity of mathe-
matical concepts that they can reach definitive conclusions about the
nature of reality – of the cosmos, of the smallest particles, of geologi-
cal formations, of biological development, and indeed of social and
economic life. in between, the discussion of concepts and ideas is
central to epistemology, the philosophy of language, the philosophy
of logic, and even the philosophy of mind.
the critical question is how to proceed. rather than presuming a
position of authority from which to assess theories, both past and
present, it is useful to enter into dialogue with those thinkers who
have reflected on similar questions and proposed subtle and well–
thought out answers. We can learn from their insights, even as we
recognize their limitations. so, in the pages that follow, we encounter
plato, aristotle, the stoics, descartes, locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant,
Hegel, J.s. Mill, c.s. peirce, and Frege. i introduce each at the point
where his thoughts can contribute to our itinerary.
our initial question structures the first part of that itinerary: how
are ideas related to concepts? Frege sets the stage in chapter 1, with
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 9 2013-02-05 12:36:27

10 Prologue
his challenge to “psychologism.” in chapter 2, i consider how the

British empiricists reduce human understanding to the way ideas are
formed from our sensations and experiences. Hegel then offers us –
see chapter 3 – a psychology describing how we move from such ideas
to abstract thoughts – through language (chapter 4) and memory
(chapter 5). since pure thoughts remain ambiguous, we turn in
chapter 6 to descartes to propose a way forward and apply in chap-
ters 7, 8, and 9 his second, third, and fourth rules of reasoning, with
the assistance of aristotle, Kant, and peirce. chapter 10 draws out the
implications of this analysis for our understanding of concepts.
Having in part i shown how concepts can emerge from psychologi-
cal operations, i explore in part ii some implications that follow from
that discussion. in chapter 11, i return to Hegel to explore what hap-
pens when we conceive; Hegel’s “indeterminate” terms offer implicit
meanings – i call them “tendrils” – that lead eventually to more fully
refined concepts. next, i see how traditional forms of inference
can help us explore these tendrils and how they connect concepts:
aristotle’s syllogisms (chapter 12), modus ponens (chapter 13), and
arguments from analogy (chapter 14). in chapter 15, i suggest that
the syntax of a language can influence the kinds of tendrils that a
reflective thinker might explore. and in chapter 16, i draw conclu-
sions about how ideas and concepts interact in our daily lives. an
epilogue suggests some metaphysical implications of the arguments
of this volume.
For concepts turn out to be not isolated, independent, and un-
changing atoms of meaning, but contain tendrils that reach out
towards other meanings and alter their sense as we explore those
implications.
if this argument is successful, then, we will not need to follow Frege
in placing ideas and concepts in two different realms, one in the hu-
man mind and the other in a platonic heaven. the various functions
of the human mind can build on each other, enabling us to escape
our subjective and idiosyncratic world, to reach reliable conclusions
about the way the world really is, and to act effectively in achieving
our purposes. the following pages suggest how that is possible.
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 10 2013-02-05 12:36:27

part one
From ideas to concepts
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1
Frege and Psychologism
We start with Gottlob Frege, who originally identified the

fallacy of psychologism. What does he mean by the term? and
what reasons does he give for labelling it a fallacy? any solution to
those questions can come only from a careful examination of his
arguments.
taking his stand against the introspective psychology of the nine-
teenth century exemplified by Mill and Husserl, Frege distinguishes
“between image and concept, between imagination and thought.”1
as a general term for image and imagination, as well as “sensations”
and “mental pictures, formed from the amalgamated traces of earlier
sense impressions,”2 Frege adopts the term Vorstellung, which his
english translators render as “idea.” For concept and thought, he
uses Begriff and Denken, respectively, regularly translated as “concept”
and “thought.”
as Frege sees it, the problem with Vorstellungen, or ideas, is that they
are subjective. “a man never has somebody else’s mental image, but
1 “review of Husserl’s Philosophie der Arithmetik” [317], reprinted in G. Frege,

Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. p. Geach and M. Black
(oxford: Blackwell, 1966), 79. in the light of this review, Husserl changed his ap-
proach to logic and mathematics and developed a critique of psychologism in the
Prolegomena to his Logical Investigations, trans. J.n. Finlay (london: routledge & Kegan
paul, 1970). Whereas Frege frames the conflict in terms of ideas and concepts,
Husserl focuses on laws: “the opposite of a law of nature, as an empirically based rule
regarding what is and occurs, is not a normative law or a prescription, but an ideal law,
in the sense of one based purely on concepts, ideas, purely conceived essences, and
so not empirical” (i, §43, 106).
2 G. Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), trans. J.l. austin (new york:
Harper, 1960), xvii.
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14 From Ideas to Concepts
only his own; and nobody even knows how far his image (say) of red
agrees with somebody else’s.”3 often saturated with feeling, ideas are
internal images, “arising from memories of sense impressions which
i have had and acts, both internal and external, which i have per-
formed.” as a result, it is highly unlikely that two people will have the
same idea, or Vorstellung, for any term that they happen to use in
conversation. “a painter, a horseman, and a zoologist will probably
connect different ideas with the name ‘Bucephalus.’”4 Because “an
idea in the subjective sense is what is governed by the laws of associa-
tion; it is of a sensible, pictorial character;” and so on many occasions
ideas are demonstrably different in different people.5
this is why Frege took his stand against using psychology to explain
the rigours of logical reasoning:
the expression ‘law of thought’ tempts us into viewing these laws as govern-
ing thinking in the same way as the laws of nature govern events in the exter-
nal world. they can be nothing other than psychological laws, since thinking
is a mental process. and if logic were concerned with these psychological
laws, then it would be a part of psychology. and so it is in fact conceived.
these laws of thought can then be conceived as guiding principles in so far
as they indicate a mean, just as we can say what counts as normal human di-
gestion, grammatical speech, or fashionable dress. We can then only say: the
holding as true [Fürwahrhalten] of things by people conforms on average with
these laws, at present and to the best of our knowledge; if one therefore
wants to remain in accordance with this mean, one will conform with them.
But just as what is fashionable today ceases to be fashionable after a while
and is not at present fashionable amongst the chinese, so too the psycho-
logical laws of thought can only be laid down as authoritative with quali-
fications. this is certainly so if logic is concerned with being held as true
[Fürwahrhalten] rather than with being true [Wahrsein]! and these are what
the psychological logicians confuse … in response i can only say: being true is
quite different from being held as true, whether by one, or by many, or by all,
and is in no way to be reduced to it. there is no contradiction in something
3 “review of Husserl,” 79.

4 “on sense and reference” [29], in G. Frege, The Frege Reader, ed. Michael Beaney
(oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 154.
5 Foundations of Arithmetic, 37.
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Frege and Psychologism 15
being true which is held by everyone as false … if being true is thus indepen-
dent of being recognized as true by anyone, then the laws of truth are not
psychological laws, but boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which
our thoughts can overflow but not dislodge.6
this sharp dichotomy between psychology and logic rules out any
investigation of logic as a function of some mental activity we might
call “thinking” or “conceiving.” then we would be in danger of defin-
ing as “good” those inferences and associations that appear common
within a certain society or setting. there can be no guarantee that we
are using our minds to reach reliable and true conclusions overall.
none the less Frege does not fall prey to the belief that all thinking
is relative. He distinguishes the subjectivity of Vorstellungen, or ideas,
from the objectivity of concepts and thought, Begriffe und Denken. in
a footnote to The Foundations of Arithmetic, he allows that in everyday
speech Vorstellung may include objects and concepts, both of which
are objective and not subjective, and so the same for all. in this sense,
“an idea in the objective sense belongs to logic and is in principle
non-sensible, although the word which means an objective idea is
often accompanied by a subjective idea, which nevertheless is not its
meaning.”7 But to avoid confusion, Frege limits his use of the term to
only its subjective sense.
so, in “on sense and reference” he distinguishes ideas (Vorstellungen)
from the sense of a sign, “which may be the common property of
many people, and so is not a part or a mode of the individual mind.”8
Because “one and the same thought can be grasped by many men …
the constituents of the thought, and a fortiori things themselves, must
be distinguished from the images that accompany in some minds the
act of grasping the thought – images that each man forms of things.”9
yet there is an interesting phrase in that last citation: “the act
of grasping the thought.” Frege returns to it in a letter to Husserl:
“thoughts are not mental entities, and thinking is not the mental
generation of such entities but the grasping of thoughts which are
6 Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, i, xv–xvi, in Frege Reader, ed. Beaney, 202–3.

7 Foundations of Arithmetic, 37.
8 [29], in Frege Reader, ed. Beaney, 154.
9 “review of Husserl” [317], in Writings, ed. Geach and Black, 79.
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already present objectively.”10 For all that concepts and ideas are
objective and the same for everyone, human beings must use their
minds if they are to apprehend them. “the grasp of a thought,” Frege
comments much later, “presupposes someone who grasps it, who
thinks. He is the owner of the thinking, not of the thought. although
the thought does not belong with the contents of the thinker’s con-
sciousness, there must be something in his consciousness that is
aimed at the thought.”11
throughout The Foundations of Arithmetic, Frege makes similar ref-
erences to the intellectual dynamic involved in grasping a thought:
“often it is only after immense intellectual effort, which may have
continued over centuries, that humanity at last succeeds in achieving
knowledge of a concept in its pure form, in stripping off the irrelevant
accretions which veil it from the eye of the mind.” to define a concept
requires a “precise delimitation of the extent of [its] validity.” in an ar-
gument against Mill’s thesis that numbers are the result of inductive
generalizations, he writes: “the three in [a triangle] we do not see
directly; rather we see something upon which we fasten an intellectual
activity of ours leading to a judgement in which the number 3 occurs.”
“the concept,” he goes on to say, with reference to Kant, “has a pow-
er of collecting together far superior to the unifying power of synthetic
apperception.” not only do we acquire concepts “by direct abstraction
from a number of objects. We can, on the contrary, arrive at a con-
cept equally well by starting from defining characteristics; and in such a
way it is possible for nothing to fall under it.”12
so even if concepts are not subjective mental entities but have an
independent existence apart from any mind that happens to think
them, some kind of intellectual activity allows us to think them, an
activity that can involve abstraction, construction, and some kind of
collecting together. indeed, at one point Frege suggests that one can
improve this ability to grasp thoughts when one is able to dissociate
oneself from the particular conditions of one’s native language and
from the associations and feelings that have attached to them: “it is
true that we can express the same thought in different languages; but
10 in Frege Reader, ed. Beaney, 302 (my italics).

11 “thought” [75], in ibid., 342.
12 Foundations of Arithmetic, xix, 1, 32, 61, 62 (my italics throughout).
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the psychological trappings, the clothing of the thought, will often be

different. this is why the learning of foreign languages is useful for
one’s logical education. seeing that the same thought can be worded
in different ways, we learn better to distinguish the verbal husk from the
kernel with which, in any given language, it appears to be organically
bound up. this is how the differences between languages can facili-
tate our grasp of what is logical.”13
Because Frege refuses to identify the intellectual act of thinking
(which would be psychological) with the content being thought, he
has to distinguish between the act of conceiving and the concept ap-
prehended. the latter is objective, stands in some sense outside the
mind grasping it, and remains the same for all people who conceive
it whenever and wherever that happens. it rises above the relativity
that comes from idiosyncratic psychological traits, cultural differ-
ences, or historical development and resides in some platonic realm
of pure forms.14 the mental activity is subjective, dependent on a
particular person’s intellectual development, and indeed the lan-
guages which she is able to speak or the cultures in which he lives; so
it has nothing at all to do with logic.
But there is something peculiar about the distinction between the
objectivity of concepts and the subjectivity of all intellectual activity.
For what is it about the processes that go on in our minds while ab-
stracting, collecting, and constructing our thoughts that enables us
to move beyond our idiosyncrasies, so that we can eventually grasp in
its completeness the sense of an independently subsisting concept
and thus escape from the subjectivity of ideas and imaginative con-
structions? How are we able to free ourselves from our subjective ex-
periences to understand and conceive pure, objective, concepts?
to indicate the relevance of these questions, let us look once again
at The Foundations of Arithmetic, where Frege endeavours to define the
13 “logic” [154], in Frege Reader, ed. Beaney, 243 (my italics). to be sure, even
this approach may have flaws, so he goes on to argue for an artifical conceptual
notation.
14 as a graduate student, i learned how this “objective” status of concepts posed
problems for his empirically minded successors, who found it difficult to determine
the ontological status of concepts or of any propositions that incorporated those con-
cepts. they were reluctant to ascribe being or existence to entities that are neither
spatial nor temporal, but eternal.
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concept of number. He takes us through a whole sequence of argu-

ments or reasonings, which involve rejecting the positions of other
thinkers, proposing alternatives, and justifying his final result as
something reliable and true. this train of reasoning appears to be in
some way significant for the conclusion he wants to reach; yet when
Bertrand russell later showed that the definition Frege proposed re-
sults in a paradox of self-reference, the conceptual definition became
problematic. the intellectual activity in this whole process seems to
ensure that the concept we end up grasping is genuinely objective.
We benefit from knowing a number of languages; we follow through
implications and show that they lead to contradictions; we construct
solutions to apparent paradoxes; and we benefit from exposing the
flaws in our predecessors and contemporaries.
We reach the point where we think the pure, unchanging concept
through a psychological process that is not bedevilled by images and
associations, but rather struggles with the meanings of the concepts
themselves, even if, once we understand the concept, we “recognize” it
as holding for all times and places. it was russell’s “subjective” reason-
ing that showed how peculiar and idiosyncratic – indeed “psychologi-
cal” – Frege’s earlier definition had been. the divide between subjective
and objective does not seem to be as sharp as Frege suggests.
once we notice that difficulty, we discover a subtle shift in Frege’s
argument, which seldom attracts notice. He starts out by rejecting
ideas, or Vorstellungen, that derive from mental images and memories
and respond to the feelings and associations that emerge in idiosyn-
cratic experience. He wants to avoid basing logical validity on the
psychological laws of association, which stem from such images and
memories. and since these were the objects of contemporary psy-
chology, he identifies them with that discipline and so rejects them
under the blanket term “psychologism.” But, as we saw above, intel-
lectual activity includes more than the subjective mental imaginings
and Vorstellungen that were the initial object of concern. it also en-
compasses such mental acts as abstraction and construction, grasping
a thought, or understanding a meaning.
calling the culprit “psychology,” without restriction, conceals the
limited range of the phenomena that originally posed the problem
and expands the attack to include all intellectual acts whatever, even
those that do not obviously involve images, feelings, or associations.
it simply assumes that all such acts are the work of individual thinkers,
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even when they arise in the disciplined search for mathematical or

scientific truth; so they are in danger of becoming idiosyncratic. it
ignores the significant differences between a stream of conscious-
ness involving ideas, or Vorstellungen, and the mental discipline of
conceptual understanding and inference, by which we refine our
thoughts to ensure that they do justice to reality and can be under-
stood by other people, even though both intellectual processes are
functions of a single working intelligence.
in the light of these difficulties with Frege’s formulation of the fal-
lacy of psychologism, we need to do some more thinking about the
various kinds of mental processes he discusses: specifically, the enter-
taining of ideas, or Vorstellungen, and the grasping of thoughts. How
can they both be functions of a single human mind? and how are
they to be distinguished so that, when we are thinking objectively, we
are not afflicted by the temptations of our subjectivity? Frege’s argu-
ment hinges on establishing a significant difference of kind between
the two: one subjective, the other objective. What kind of mental ac-
tivity introduces a break so radical that we can transcend our own
limitations? Faced with this new set of questions, we might well go
back to the British empiricists, who sought to explain logic by appeal-
ing to psychology, and see if the success or failure of their arguments
might provide a way of proceeding.
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2
From Sensations to Ideas: The Empiricists
The best place to start exploring what happens when we

entertain ideas, or Vorstellungen, is with the British empiricists John
locke, George Berkeley, and david Hume. For they explicitly define
ideas as retained images.
the seventeenth century saw vicious wars of religion. in europe,
the thirty years War set protestants against catholics. in Britain, the
civil War pitted High church anglican royalists against presbyterian
and independent parliamentarians. these were conflicts not simply
about power or control of land, but also about ideas and what people
held to be true. not surprising, then, the century also witnessed an
interest in how to transcend mere opinion and achieve some confi-
dence in our thinking. is there a way we humans can dissolve conflict-
ing beliefs into some kind of assured agreement?
on the continent, a mercenary soldier who had fought on both
sides of the conflict, took respite from the battles and one day sat
down by a warm stove to explore what conclusions he could reach if
he relied only on indubitable convictions. By starting from clear and
distinct ideas (or what we might call concepts), argued the mathema-
tician, rené descartes, we can move towards reliable conclusions
about the mind, God, and the world. We look at how he did this in
due course.
in Britain, however, a different approach surfaced. as happened
with descartes, a dispute about religious matters started John locke
on the inquiry, which led to his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
But he was already highly suspicious of abstract principles or con-
cepts. there was, he claimed, no evidence that humans immediately
grasp such thoughts. our minds start out, in effect, as blank slates,
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From Sensations to Ideas: The Empiricists 21
passively receiving both the input of our senses and the results of
introspection on our internal feelings and functions. copies of these
immediate impressions (as Hume would later call them) become the
ideas that eventually provide the constituents of our beliefs and
knowledge. every thought, then, ultimately derives, and acquires its
justification, from an image impressed on the mind or from a combi-
nation of such images. to be sure, locke allowed that we could iso-
late parts of such original images from their context and focus on
them alone – a process he called “abstraction.” But even so, what is
important about ideas is no result of our mental activity but rather
stems from our individual sensations, which we retain in our memo-
ry and then build into more complex constructions. By grounding
our thoughts in our experience of the world rather than in the con-
structs of our minds, locke maintained, we can reach reliable, and
shared, conclusions.
in making this claim, locke assumed that everyone’s basic experi-
ences, and the processes by which they become ideas, are essentially
similar. He moved easily to a rather surprising affirmation: because of
this shared internal dynamic, anyone who generates abstract ideas
and then expresses them by some kind of signifying sound can easily
establish linguistic communication with other sociable creatures.
there is, however, an unexplained leap in this reasoning. all words,
he says, even those that do not stand for sensible things, “have had
their first rise from sensible ideas.”1 thus “words in their primary or
immediate signification, stand for nothing, but the ideas in the mind
of him that uses them.” Whenever the hearer “represents to himself
other men’s ideas, by some of his own, if he consent to give them the
same names that other men do, ‘tis still to his own ideas; to ideas that
he has, and not to ideas that he has not.”2 none the less, locke con-
tinues, people assume that their interlocutors also have ideas, signi-
fied by the same sounds, and that the sounds stand for the same ideas.
this assumption is justifiable because “men would not be thought to
talk barely of their own imaginations, but of things as they really are;
therefore they often suppose their words to stand also for the reality
1 John locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. peter H. nidditch

(oxford: clarendon, 1975), iii, i, §5. in all quotations from locke, i abandon capital-
izing his nouns, as well as his extensive use of italics.
2 ibid., iii, ii, §2.
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of things.”3 But this justification contains two questionable assump-

tions: first, that our idiosyncratic sensations have direct acquaintance
with what is significant in the real world, and, second, that people will
generally make similar moves to the same “real” content even though
they start from their distinct sensations and reflections.
locke admits that the latter condition is not always satisfied. the
fact that words “signify only men’s peculiar ideas, and that by a per-
fectly arbitrary imposition, is evident, in that they often fail to excite
in others (even that use the same language) the same ideas, we take
them to be signs of.” this problem makes all communication condi-
tional and suspect: “Unless a man’s words excite the same ideas in the
hearer, which he makes them stand for in speaking, he does not speak
intelligibly.”4 the reasoning sounds dangerously circular: the fact
that people speak intelligibly shows that people talk of things as they
really are; but it is because all words ultimately derive from immediate
experience of the world that people can communicate effectively.
this places the critical step in his argument at the point where he
claims that we can encounter things as they really are – that we can
move beyond the idiosyncrasies of our immediate sensations and re-
flections. He realizes that circumstances condition many of our expe-
riences. colours and sounds can change depending on light and
velocity; they are only secondary qualities. But, he maintains, there
are primary qualities through which we have access to objects as they
are in themselves: solidity, extension, figure, and mobility. the fragil-
ity of this move to objectivity becomes more explicit once Berkeley
points out that our sensations of even the primary qualities of exten-
sion, shape, and mobility vary depending on the particular angle
from which we approach a particular scene. the table we are looking
at reveals not only a range of colours depending on how the light
reflects off the surface, but also the shape of a trapezoid; its size varies
depending on its distance from us. the sound coming from the ve-
hicle on a busy road alters as it passes where we are standing. the
shape of a sculpture we feel with our eyes closed is affected by the
texture of its surface. the move from immediate impressions to ideas
of things as they really are thus becomes increasingly problematic.
3 ibid., §5.
4 ibid., §8.
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all our immediate sensations, which we receive passively, are condi-

tioned by the timing and placing of our sense organs vis-à-vis the
things that make their impression on them. We do not have unmedi-
ated access to solidity, extension, figure, and mobility. so it is not
surprising that immanuel Kant, following the empiricists in affirming
our passivity when sensing, concludes that a spatial and temporal
frame organizes these passive intuitions – a subjective space and time
that is simply the universal form of all the data we receive. so the in-
evitable conclusion: in the pure receptivity of sensible intuition, we
have access not to things as they really are but only to the way they
appear from our restricted perspective. the move from (subjective)
sensations to (objective) thoughts is impossible if we restrict ourselves
to the pure receptivity of experience, but requires the active media-
tion of our minds.
indeed, locke appears to suggest this. We move beyond the par-
ticular qualities we are sensing to some idea of the thing in question
only by using our minds to construct complex ideas. in other words,
our idea of one thing, or of a substance that underlies a variety of di-
rect sensations, is nothing but a supposition based on an (innate?)
inability to imagine “how these simple ideas can subsist by themselves.”5
in other words, because locke rejects innate ideas, which would
have to include any tendency of our minds to think in similar ways,6
and because of the way he traces the origin of words and ideas back
to the actual experiences of each individual, it is difficult to see how
he can hope that two individuals will ever come to have the same idea.
one begins to wonder why he believed that anyone else could cor-
rectly grasp the argument he puts forward in the Essay.
By basing the validity of ideas on our subjective and idiosyncratic
experiences, then, locke has set himself up for Frege’s attack. if one
bases all thinking on ideas deriving directly from personal experi-
ence, one cannot explain or justify the use of language to communi-
cate common meanings. it is impossible to ensure that different
5 see Essay, ii, xxiii, §1.

6 in locke’s discussion of complex ideas, he assumes that all human minds orga-
nize immediate sensations in regular ways, else he could not claim that such ideas
stand for things as they really are. But this sounds as if he is bringing some form of
innate ideas in by the back door.
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minds are thinking the same thing, even though they may use the
same word or sign.
this fundamental problem with locke’s analysis, however, did not

prevent his successors from furthering his initiative. it was, for ex-
ample, George Berkeley who saw the implications of locke’s theories
for abstract ideas. there can be, for Berkeley, no such thing as a pure
concept (if we use Frege’s term) in a mind. nor can minds abstract
from the particular content of any retained image, as locke suggests.
Berkeley does not deny that people entertain general ideas. But these
are simply a special application of the particular ideas deriving from
immediate impressions. “now if we will annex a meaning to our
words,” he writes, “and speak only of what we can conceive, i believe
we shall acknowledge, that an idea, which considered in itself is par-
ticular, becomes general, by being made to represent or stand for all
other particular ideas of the same sort.”7 Whenever we think of any-
thing, what we have is a distinctive mental image, which stands as a
placeholder for a number of associated sensations and impressions.
thinking the abstract noun “tree” involves perhaps picturing the ap-
ple tree that stood in our back yard when we were young. and that is
the entire significance of the term, although we are ready to extend
the image by analogy to oaks and maples, pines and poplars. it is only
because we have used words to represent such ideas that philosophers
have come to believe that there are such things as abstract ideas.
david Hume extended locke and Berkeley’s approach to a consid-
eration of human reasoning more generally – the activity of minds.
First, in A Treatise of Human Nature he introduced the distinction we
have adopted above between impressions and ideas. Under impres-
sions, “i comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as
they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas i mean the faint
image of these in thinking and reasoning.”8 these retained images
7 see in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (indianapolis:

Hackett, 1982), introduction, §12, 13. as we can see from this passage, Berkeley does
use the verb “conceive,” but only to describe the entertaining of ideas or retained
images.
8 d. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (london: penguin, 1984), i, i, 1. Hume’s
use of the phrase “faint image” veils the complexity of the move from a particular
direct sensation or feeling to the generality of an idea that applies to a number of
experiences.
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do not simply reflect what the person originally sensed, but become
more general and are applied to other, similar experiences. Hume
adopted from Berkeley the thesis that abstract, or general ideas are in
fact particular images that have come to stand for a number of other
similar images: “abstract ideas are therefore in themselves individual,
however they may become general in their representation. the im-
age in the mind is only that of a particular object, tho’ the application
of it in our reasoning be the same, as if it were universal.”9
at first, Hume claimed that, when the force or vivacity of the ideas
increases, the mind moves from simply entertaining ideas or images
to believing that objects really exist and have the characteristics that
people associate with them as well.10 By the time he had completed
the third book of the Treatise, however, Hume had some second
thoughts about this assertion: “Had i said, that two ideas of the same
object can only be different by their different feeling, i should have
been closer to the truth.”11 this suggests that belief in real existence
is a matter of subjective feeling, not of any extra excitement deriving
from the original impression. the tenuous connection that locke
sketched between particular sensations, thoughts of real things, and
the generality of words is here being stretched to the breaking point.
in other words, Hume agrees with Frege in pointing out that feelings
radically infect retained images, which, like immediate sensations,
vary from individual to individual.
locke had said that the mind not only combines original impres-
sions into more compound ideas – for example, taking the colour
pink, the feeling of a thorn prick, and the smell of perfume into the
compound idea of a rose – it also relates ideas to each other. Hume
expands on this pattern of relation, calling it the action of reasoning:
“reasoning,” he writes, “consists in nothing but a comparison and a
discovery of those relations, either constant or inconstant, which
two or more objects bear to each other.”12 a relation of this sort he
defines as the “quality by which two ideas are connected together in
9 ibid., i, i, 7. earlier in the same chapter, he writes: “a great philosopher ... has
asserted, that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain
term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon
occasion other individuals which are similar to them.”
10 see ibid., i, iii, 7.
11 Treatise, iii, appendix.
12 ibid., i, iii, 2.
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the imagination, and the one naturally introduces the other.”13 in oth-
er words, reasoning relies on natural connections that occur within
the stream of consciousness and that have developed over time from
repeated experiences of similar impressions, and the images that re-
sult from them. the philosopher or reflective thinker extends this
core competence and creates additional connections by comparing
ideas that the imagination arbitrarily brings together. causation is the
only kind of reasoning by which the mind is “able to go beyond what is
immediately present to the senses, either to discover the real existence
or the relation of objects.”14 it, however, we can explain as the result of
“constant conjunction” – the repetition of similar experiences – and
the habits or customs of mind that this regularity generates.
the British empiricists start with sensations that can be compared
to notice how they are similar. as resemblances positively reinforce
each other, the mind retains an image of one that stands for all and
is retained as an idea – something general, now divorced from the
mind’s immediate encounter with the world. over time, experience
collects a number of such atomic ideas, which may then become units
in a further comparison, so it sees that the red of the rose (which
could be an initial general idea deriving from a number of direct
impressions) resembles the red of a cardinal and the red of a burning
cinder, which comes to stand as a sign for all of them, while the green
of its leaves comes to represent the green of a caterpillar and the
green of a patch of moss, or the sharpness of its thorn signifies the
sharpness of a needle and the sharpness of a mosquito bite. the pro-
cess can extend further until the scarlet of these roses stands not only
for the common redness of a number of things, but also for the way
this red is like that green and the other blue, to form the general idea
of “colour”; and beyond this for the way colour is like other “quali-
ties” of things: shape, taste, texture.
the whole process happens simply through what psychologists call
“positive reinforcement” – similar things repeated strengthen the
retained idea in the imagination and allow it to be compared with
other retained images, permitting the results to become ever more
general, until the image of this single flower may represent or stand
for a wide range of ideas, depending on what parts of that image are
13 ibid., i, i, 5.
14 ibid., i, iii, 2.
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 26 2013-02-05 12:36:28

currently the focus of attention. Ultimately, each idea functions be-

cause the mind associates it with some image, or “decayed sense,”
which, as Berkeley says, continues to be its phenomenal existence –
the face it presents to introspection. reasoning is the residual work
of comparison and resemblance.15
in the nineteenth century, John stuart Mill further extended this em-
piricist tradition. after reiterating the principle that thoughts (or
ideas) resemble sensations (or impressions) but have less intensity,16
he then went on to develop the laws of association, advanced earlier
by his father, James Mill, by which ideas retained subconsciously from
the past may re-emerge, prompted by new impressions or other ideas
already present in the mind. these laws are three in number. First,
similar ideas tend to excite one another (Hume’s relation of resem-
blance or identity). second, when two impressions have frequently
been experienced (or thought) either simultaneously or in immedi-
ate succession, then whenever one of these impressions, or the idea
of it, recurs, it tends to excite the idea of the other (Hume’s relations
of space and time, together with his “constant conjunction”). and
third, greater intensity in either or both of the impressions is equiva-
lent, in rendering them excitable by one another, to a greater fre-
quency of conjunction.17
Ultimately, all of Mill’s laws and all of Hume’s types of reasoning rely
on the fundamental priority of the first: resemblance, or that similar
15 i deliberately avoid consideration of the more complicated mental process by

which we move from particular qualities to clusters of them in the thought of things
such as a rose, a garden, a palette, and so on.
16 System of Logic, Vi, iv, §3, 557: “Whenever any state of consciousness has once
been excited in us, no matter by what cause, an inferior degree of the same state of
consciousness, or state of consciousness resembling the former, but inferior in inten-
sity, is capable of being reproduced in us, without the presence of any such cause as
excited it at first.”
17 ibid., Vi, iv, §3. in his An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, Mill
adds a fourth law: “When an association has acquired this character of inseparability –
when the bond between the two ideas has been thus firmly riveted, not only does the
idea called up by the association become in our consciousness, inseparable from the
idea which suggested it, but the facts or phenomena answering to those ideas come at
last to seem inseparable in existence.” 2nd ed. (london: longman’s Green & co.,
1895), 191. this was to explain how we think of complex things that integrate a
number of descriptive qualities.
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 27 2013-02-05 12:36:28

ideas tend to excite one another. Because resemblance is a relation

that derives from whatever the mind is comparing (whereas contiguity,
simultaneity, and succession depend on the spatio-temporal setting
of the agent who experiences), any reflective observer can recognize
it about any kind of object. But, as we saw above, this ability to recog-
nize similarity extends further back into the very formation of ideas.
an immediate impression becomes an idea because it represents a
number of other similar impressions. a particular idea becomes gen-
eral when it comes to stand for other particular ideas of the same sort.
the whole empiricist edifice presupposes the mind’s ability to com-
pare and to find similarities among retained images.
resemblance is not as strong a claim as identity (although Hume
sometimes uses that word). it allows that the ideas one is comparing
may differ in some respects, for all that they are similar in those ger-
mane to the particular act of association. For the empiricists, the
mind sets aside these differences so that the particular image can
stand for the ideas it intends.
despite what Hume claims, however, no two immediate experi-
ences – even of the selfsame thing – are absolutely identical. as i sug-
gested above, different perspectives and different lighting can change
the visible characteristics of a sensation: the colour, the shape, the
size. texture and resistance can depend on which part of our body
comes in contact with it and how. the sound of a train depends on
whether it is approaching or moving away, whether it occurs in a muf-
fled or a resonating environment.
this means that noticing resemblances in our experiences is not
as straightforward and immediate as the empiricists suggest, even in
the move from impression to idea. the latter is not simply a “faint
image” of the former. We use our minds to discriminate and identify
which feature of our sensory field we want to highlight in forming
our simple, as well as our general ideas. so even at this most basic
level, there is an act of abstraction; we focus on one particular aspect
of our sensations rather than another. and this process of discrimi-
nation becomes more complicated as we move into more general
contexts. does the rose image in our minds represent a shade of
pink, or a shade of green; things which can prick, or a particular
perfume; a particular species, or roses in general; garden plants,
plants as opposed to animals, or all living things; the advent of
summer, or romeo’s love for Juliet? the initial image by itself,
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 28 2013-02-05 12:36:28

which is all that results from our immediate impression, does not
tell us what content we are to think.
the further one moves from the concrete, the more arbitrary does
this process of noticing resemblances become. at the most basic lev-
el, we must decide whether we are thinking of red, a rose, a flower, or
a shrub. When we come to Hume’s customary sequences, are we to
think of how day follows night, how particular images of our house
follow one another as we walk around it, or of how thriving plants
follow rain showers? if a friend tries to explain what the word “walk”
means by moving from his chair to the door, we may have difficulty in
knowing whether he wants us to think of “exiting,” “moving,” “rest-
lessness,” or “exercise.” and if this conversation takes place while we
are already walking, and he walks faster to make his point, can we be
sure that the term does not refer to “running.”18
the fact that similar sensations frequently recur in our experience
provides some justification for the empiricist claim that the world of
ideas, or Vorstellungen, is a function of our ability to notice resem-
blances and generalize. comparison emerges at a number of differ-
ent levels, starting with the simple shift to a primitive image, through
an ascending hierarchy to the most general of causal connections.
none the less, it remains in thrall to the basic problem of all appeals
to direct experience that Frege identifies: spatial and temporal con-
text shapes immediate impressions, which fit into the stream of each
person’s unique consciousness; interests and feelings influence them;
and comparison identifies similarities through a mental operation
separate from the concrete details. and since we must not appeal to
any innate ideas, there is no obvious reason to assume that all people
will perform those operations in the same way, whether in forming
the most basic ideas or in making the generalizations that emerge.
ideas whose only justification involves an appeal to immediate expe-
rience cannot hope to provide a reliable measure for public commu-
nication, much less arrive at some valid knowledge of the world
beyond our direct acquaintance.
there are, then, more sophisticated operations involved in moving
from impression to idea than simply noticing resemblances in an
18 this last example comes from augustine’s dialogue: De Magistro or The Teacher.
it appears in Augustine: Earlier Writings, trans. J.H.s. Burleigh (philadelphia:
Westminster, 1953), 69–101.
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 29 2013-02-05 12:36:28

immediate and direct way. even the formation of the simplest ideas
presupposes kinds of mental activity other than comparison, such as
abstraction and discrimination. to gain some sense of what these
might be and how they function, we need to look more closely at
what happens to the immediate sensations and impressions of direct
experience as the mind incorporates them into the dynamic sponta-
neity of mental activity. By identifying what operations, other than
simple comparison, come into play, we may be able to develop a more
accurate picture, not only of the way we come to share a common
language, but also of how we achieve reliable thoughts about the
world. We need to overcome the fundamental lacunae we have iden-
tified in locke’s argument and in those of his successors.
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 30 2013-02-05 12:36:28

3
How Ideas Emerge: Hegel
What intellectual operations are involved in formulating

ideas? What happens as we develop internal images from immediate
sensations to the point of using language? in the psychology of Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, i found a fairly detailed analysis of that
process – one more plausible than the empiricists’. By using his text
as a guide,1 one can develop a narrative describing how distinct intel-
lectual functions emerge, each building on the one that precedes,
and setting the context for what follows. as each one surfaces in the
story, i highlight it, using italics.
We can start from what Hume calls the impressions presented by
both the senses and internal reflection. since we receive these pas-
sively, we have the conviction that we are in direct contact with reality.
But these immediate sensations are not atomic, isolated units, each
one arriving in independent isolation, but a rich panorama of sights,
sounds, textures, smells, and feelings. they change constantly; for
time presses forward, and we move from place to place. indeed, when
we abstain from any initiative on our part and simply immerse our-
selves in what is happening, we find ourselves in a flowing stream that
can soon become a chaos of varying and mutating impressions. since
these impressions simply appear, there is nothing that separates or
distinguishes them from each other.
For this multitude of sensations and impressions to develop some
significance requires more than simple, passive reception. We need
to take some initiative. From within the wide range of sights and
1 see G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and a.V. Miller (oxford:
clarendon press, 1971), §§445–60, 188–218.
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 31 2013-02-05 12:36:29

sounds, textures and smells, we focus our attention on particular givens

and take note of how they differ from their surroundings. We indi-
viduate them through conscious activity that shines its spotlight on
some moments and lets others slip into oblivion.
empiricist literature talks as if the primary items of our immediate
awareness are undifferentiated blocks of colour, distinctive shapes,
and, possibly, insistent sounds. it seems more likely, however, that
what attracts our attention is not things that are static and uniform,
but changes and alterations: perhaps a bird song that erupts from a
nearby tree, the mauve light that appears as the sun sets, the nervous
sprint of a chipmunk. Movement attracts our notice and leads us to
focus on what has moved. the sensations that are to become the basis
of our cognitive treasury, then, are not of simple qualities, but of
actions, events, and whatever constitutes them.
By focusing on some of the givens of sense and reflection, we sepa-
rate them off from the multi-faceted panorama that the senses pro-
vide and appropriate them into the domain of our minds. We select
particular changes and entities from the flowing stream of immedi-
ate experience and make them our possession. We have looked into,
or intuited, some of the givens that have impressed themselves on
our mind.
But these intuitions do not stay long. other experiences press
upon us, and we turn to new sounds, new sights, new feelings. When
we are no longer aware of them, however, the original intuitions do
not evaporate into nothingness. once they have become our posses-
sion through the focus of attention, they disappear into a hidden part of
our minds that retains impressions even though we are no longer con-
scious of them. at the time, certainly, we do not notice this archiving
activity. But later, long after our first encounter with the fragrance of
a pink rose, for example, we run into another rose; and the retained
image of the first pops back into our mind. We can recollect that initial
encounter only because, once it happened, the “dark pit” of our sub-
conscious absorbed it as part of its inventory. Because the initial spot-
light of our attention made it our own, our intellect is able to store it
somewhere separate from the cinema of our conscious life.
in the act of recollection, we recall an original intuition because our
new experience reminds us of it; we are directly aware that one re-
sembles the other. as that kind of experience continues to repeat itself,
the original retained image comes to represent, or stand for, what is com-
mon among all the occurrences; it becomes the idea or representation
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 32 2013-02-05 12:36:29

How Ideas Emerge: Hegel 33
(Vorstellung) of “pink rose.” in Hume’s language, we have moved

from our original impression to its idea. But, despite what Hume says,
this idea is not simply a pale copy of the original. it also stands for the
way the original resembles other similar intuitions, and it draws on
the increasing store of past experiences that, over time, have disap-
peared into the “dark pit” of our subconscious. We have moved from
a singular image or intuition to something more general.
this general schema allows for at least three types of variations.
First, the “image” need not be visual. it could be a particular perfume
or taste. it could be the rustle of leaves in the wind or the song of a
sparrow. it could be the texture of a petal, the prick of a thorn, or the
felt shape of a leaf. any one of them could represent, or stand for,
what is common to the original and the current impression.
second, the image represents more than a particular perspective or
sensed quality that happens to recur. the mind collates a number of
impressions of a single rose to form a more general image. some of
these were part of the continuum of sensations that initially occurred
as we moved towards and around a particular place. But others are
simply possibles. We have a sense of the object as three-dimensional,
with a past and a future; we can anticipate perspectives and sensations
that have not in fact happened in our experience.
third, a particular image can come to stand for a number of differ-
ent generals, for it resembles not only pink roses, but also rose gar-
dens, flowers in general, plants with thorns, even vegetable nature as
distinct from animals. in other words, the one image can represent a
range of ideas, from the particular to the abstract.
to this point, we have already identified three distinct mental ini-
tiatives in the formation of ideas, some conscious and some not: intu-
ition, with its focus of attention; the storing of impressions in our
subconscious; and recollection, which draws on that subconscious to
transform the particular image into something more general by us-
ing singular, recalled impressions to represent similarities. But this is
not the end of the process. as both Hume and Mill recognize, the
mind relates ideas to one another – compares them within a single,
attentive moment. since ideas are, at this point, nothing but retained
images – we call this synthetic operation imagination. this function,
however, is not homogeneous and uniform, but assembles and relates
mental pictures in various ways.
at first, the imagination operates almost instinctively. We simply
find images connected one to another in our minds, usually because
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 33 2013-02-05 12:36:29

of some feature present in the original intuitions. at one time, we

notice a rose in a garden, along with the singing of birds and the
shade of a giant elm. so the image of a rose brings with it the recol-
lection of a sparrow’s trill or the pleasure of a cool moment on a hot
day. Contiguity of space and time Hume calls this kind of association.
or, each time we saw a rose and tried to pick it, a thorn pricked us.
and that constant repetition links the idea of a pricking with that of
a rose.
or we notice that the red of a rose resembles the red of our blood, or
the red of a fire engine.
the “stream of consciousness” thus wanders through a whole para-
dise of related thoughts, leading us far away from where we began.
this chain, says Hegel, is the result of the kind of imagination that re-
produces experiences from the past. as in the formation of ideas, this
reproductive imagination builds on resemblances; but now these are
not between repeated instances of similar things, but rather resem-
blances we notice in the experienced environment of things and
events, by which we link them to other things and events. they are, in
other words, resemblances of relation; and they enable our minds to
extend its range beyond what we immediately sense to connections
far removed from where we began.
We can divorce the relation, too, from its original context and ap-
ply it to other ideas. a pink rose that we see in a hospital ward may
lead our thoughts back to the sound of birds in a garden, and on to
the musical soundscape that we experienced on a spring morning in
a woodland park, a strenuous climb up a mountainous path, the glo-
rious vision from the top, the heat of the sun, and finally the sand on
an open beach. sherlock Holmes exploits such streams of conscious-
ness to surprise dr Watson by responding to a question just in the
process of being formed within the latter’s mind. the reproductive
imagination moves beyond the given to new ideas that link together
in unanticipated ways the items stored in the subconscious treasury
of ideas and images.2 so, as experience accumulates, an original
image comes to stand for a diversity of ideas.
2 dreams, as the work of this subconscious, create all kinds of association that
seem far removed from anything in our conscious past. so there may be many more
sorts of association than those that Hume and Mill enumerate.
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 34 2013-02-05 12:36:29

the work of imagination need not be simply reproductive – the

passive, almost instinctive, effect of our original experiences. it may
also be the product of our active, though subconscious, minds; so, if
we want, we can assume control of this activity and manipulate it de-
liberately. We then use our imaginative skills to create connections
that have never before been part of our experience, bringing togeth-
er ideas in novel and unpredictable ways. We formulate metaphors;
we generate fantasies; we write poetry; we construct castles in spain.
this use of fantasy is where the mind’s creative freedom first makes its
appearance, and we begin to assume responsibility for our own pos-
sessions. rather than simply responding to the determinate features
of images we retain from our experience, we now generate new kinds
of images and new kinds of relations. a red rose, we say, is like our
beloved. so we explore similarities that are not obvious; we see the
world in a different light; and we discover ways of imagining or think-
ing about possible worlds quite unrelated to the one in which we live.
the realm of possibilities has expanded to include relationships that
have never occurred before.
Hegel suggests, however, that we have a third type of imagination
in addition to reproductive association and fantasy. as we establish
more control over the working of our own minds, we may become
reflective and focus our attention on the similarities and resemblanc-
es which we have been using to link ideas and create imaginative
syntheses. Up to now, whenever we brought these to mind, we simply
adopted one of our retained images and let it stand for the noticed
resemblance.3 the original pink rose we recollect stands for all roses
whenever we encounter or think of them. But it may also represent
lots of other events and entities – the colour pink, the pricking of
thorns, flowers set out in gardens, the smelling of a pleasant per-
fume, our graduation ceremony, our paramour. this ambiguity easily
generates confusion and imprecision. initially, we focused on just
one aspect or another of the retained image, and ignored for the
time being all the others. ranging through the diverse foci of our at-
tention, however, we do not find it easy to discriminate clearly among
the scores of possibilities. it would be more convenient if we could
distinguish among these various uses of the pink rose image in our
mind in more permanent and reliable ways. imagination responds to
3 Much in the manner Berkeley suggests.
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 35 2013-02-05 12:36:29

this challenge by introducing a variety of signs, using each one to

represent a single kind of resemblance. We could draw pictures – but
icons turn out to be as ambiguous as the original, retained image.
More effective is the use of arbitrary patterns of sounds, where we can
make each pattern quite distinctive and require no past association
to link the sign with what we want to represent. these spoken words
are the work of the third imaginative activity we may call sign-making
imagination.
at first, each word is simply a pointer that directs our mind to a
particular idea – some retained image that we view from a single per-
spective. it does not, however, name either the image or the event it
pictures, but rather isolates one of the many possible resemblances
that it has opened up in our minds. as such, all words are general.
even proper names signify the variety of different occasions we have
encountered (or heard about) albert einstein, explored or read
about paris, appealed to the declaration of Human rights. the value
of language lies in its ability to distinguish between different general
relationships or resemblances, by abstracting from the concrete com-
plexity of singular experiences and individual images and ideas. this
discriminating activity builds on our mind’s native ability to notice
similarities among events and things, first evident in recollection, but
expanded through the dynamics of imagination.4
With this description of the way language emerges in an individual

mind, we pause in our narrative. We have been following the steps
that Hegel identified in his psychology. We have isolated and demar-
cated distinct functions, not in the sense that they are absolutely in-
dependent of each other, nor that they need occur in just this order.
rather we have explored a plausible sequence, in which we can see
how each operation, familiar from our own experience, builds on,
and presupposes, what precedes.
in this story, we have identified a number of intellectual functions,

central to the formation of ideas, or Vorstellungen: intuition, with its
focus of attention; the storing of impressions in the subconscious; rec-
ollection, which draws on this dark treasury; using images to represent
4 there is nothing distinctively human about this capacity, as animal psycholo-

gists have demonstrated.
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 36 2013-02-05 12:36:29

similarities; reproductive imagination, with its innate ability to associate

ideas on the basis of similarity, continguity, repetition, and intensity;
the creative imagination and its generation of metaphor, poetry, and
fantasy; and, finally, sign-making imagination, in which we create de-
vices for representing particular resemblances and distinguishing
them from other, closely related, ones.
in doing so, we have been following the British empiricists, as they
traced the development of language from impressions and ideas. But
we have discovered that it is a more intricate growth than they origi-
nally suggested. the mind is not nearly as passive as John locke had
claimed. it focuses its attention; it retains experiences in the subcon-
scious; it recollects; it instinctively recognizes similarities; it draws as-
sociations and creates new metaphors; it signifies and distinguishes
particular resemblances by creating words. some of these basic skills
are almost instinctive, others are deliberate and arbitrary. all are
amenable to wider use – we need not apply them just to the retained
images in the storehouse of our memory. But what those uses are will
emerge only as we proceed.
there is, however, one important characteristic that limits the
range of this narrative. it traces a development through the workings
of a single intellect – as if it all happens within one human mind.
recollection can build on the specific intuitions of only a single indi-
vidual. the “laws of association” are a function of the experiences
that have become embedded in a particular subconscious. the cre-
ative imagination is the work of a unique inventive mind. and as i
have described it, we adopt signs simply to distinguish among our
own ideas. in other words, the ideas and representations we have
been talking about are all prey to the difficulty Frege identified: “a
painter, a horseman, and a zoologist will probably connect different
ideas with the name ‘Bucephalus.’”5 no two people can ever share
the same mental picture, or the same association.
so there is a gap in our description. We have talked as if the indi-
vidual mind, having noticed and created similarities, generates dis-
tinctive signs for each of its ideas independently – entirely on its own
initiative and for its own purposes. But that is never the case. language
is not simply a means of expressing our own ideas; it is also a means
5 “on sense and reference” [29], in Frege Reader, ed. Beaney, 154.
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 37 2013-02-05 12:36:29

of communication. We use signs to inform others of what is going on

in our minds – to draw distinctions between this significance of the
pink rose and that one. this can happen because the signs we use are
not self-generated, not simply the product of our own creative imagi-
nation, but are appropriated from the vocabulary of our culture.
through language, we not only discriminate among our immediate
ideas, but also overcome the isolation of uniquely private experiences.
this, however, raises the next question to explore. How is it that
words function, not as private possessions, but as a public language?
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 38 2013-02-05 12:36:29

4
Language
Language is a communal, not an individual, accomplishment.

each person is not alone in recollecting images out of the dark pit of
the subconscious, in using them to represent shared features, in find-
ing the mind wandering along the pathways of association, in gener-
ating metaphors and fantasies, and in creating signs to stand for
particular resemblances and meanings. We are born into a commu-
nity that already gives voice to its thoughts and understands what oth-
ers say. in one sense, each sign is arbitrary, since no idea requires a
particular set of sounds as its sign. none the less we do not freely
choose the syllables we adopt, but take them over from our family,
friends, and acquaintances.
the fact that we are able to communicate one with another, how-
ever ineffectively, tells us that our ideas are not condemned to reflect-
ing nothing more than our own isolated perspective. as we become
competent in speaking a language, we gradually modify our ideas. no
longer do they reflect simply the particular resemblances and gener-
alities that happened to occur within our experience or emerge from
our subconscious. We now have two or more speakers, each with a
distinctive intellectual history – a variety of experiences, reactions,
interests, and activities. through the use of signs and language, each
reaches beyond his or her peculiar isolation. this reciprocal give-
and-take generates a new kind of arena for mental activity – one no
longer located within a particular human organism, but somehow
dwelling in the space between.
Here again, Hegel provides a helpful way of characterizing what
happens in this interaction. early in his chapter on self-consciousness
in the Phenomenology of Spirit occurs a brief, rather abstract analysis of
25229_BURBIDGE.indb 39 2013-02-05 12:36:29

Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
night for God and the Bishop.”
I did not ask him how he knew that Bishop Asbury was proud of me,
nor did I inquire into the source of his information that the
conversion, by force, of a fourteen-year-old boy was a great thing
for God. I merely said: “Yes, sir,” and went my way. But it went on
day after day; everybody in town, it seemed, had a word to say
about the pride that now swelled the heart of the Bishop as he went
about among the virgins of Heaven and lolled on a cloud strumming
his golden harp and producing platinum and diamond music. I got
very tired of it, and finally, to one old Sister who had apparently
thought of nothing else for a week, I said:
“Oh, to hell with the Bishop!”
What blasphemy! She gasped and hurried away, and long before I
reached home she had telephoned and told my mother that I had
blasphemed and cried out against God. Naturally, my mother was
worried; she thought from the tale told to her that I had gone up
and down the streets of the town shouting defiance of God and
yelling open praise of the Devil and all his works. But I told her the
whole story, and she listened without comment, and when I had
finished all she said was this:
“Well, don’t say ‘hell’ to them.”
I think that was the last I ever heard from my mother about religion,
and from my father I heard even less. Once my mother asked me to
read the Bible, and although of course I had already done so, I read
it again. I read it twice, from the first absurdity of Genesis to the
final fairy tale of Revelation. But I found nothing in it that caused me
to believe that it was an inspired work, and nothing that proved, to
me, the correctness of the pretensions so freely made by the Sisters
and Brothers and the Preachers that they, and they alone, were the
representatives and accredited agents of Jesus Christ on earth. And
the sermons that I heard thereafter—the Preachers selected single
verses from the Bible and constructed elaborate harangues around
them—struck me more forcibly than ever as the trashiest sort of
poppycock and balderdash. I was no longer afraid of the Hell that
they pictured with such avidity, and I no longer thrilled to their tales
of the magnificence of Heaven, although of course to a growing boy
the presence of so many virgin angels, all apparently willing and
available, was interesting. But none of them preached the religion of
Christ; they preached hatred and revenge. They held out slight hope
of reward; instead they were prophets of torture, promising eternal
punishment for petty crimes.
2
It was about this time, also, that I began to investigate the glories of
Bishop Asbury, and to make such inquiries as I could into his saintly
virtues. We had in our library the Bishop’s Journals in three volumes,
and we had also two or three volumes of biography, all of which I
read. In later years I have read many others. Probably twenty or
thirty books, in one form or another, have been written about Bishop
Asbury, and I think that I have gone pretty thoroughly into most of
them. But most of them are senseless if not downright idiotic; they
were written by preachers and published by the Methodist Church,
and the whole slant is religious. They are based on the assumption
that a Preacher and a Bishop must of necessity be a holy man, and
that all the little idiosyncrasies and faults that give a clue to the real
character of the man, are but manifestations of the fight between
God and Satan.
From an ecclesiastical point of view there can be no question of
Bishop Asbury’s greatness, for there have been few men who have
left a more definite imprint on American religious culture. There
were fewer than 500 Methodists in America when he came here in
1771; when he died there were 214,000, with good churches and
great influence. He had completed the church organization according
to his own ideas, ignoring to a large extent the plans of John Wesley
as set forth by Thomas Rankin and Thomas Coke, and he had
assumed as much power as a Pope of Rome. As a religious organizer
he has had few equals, and it is a great pity that he did so much
unnecessary organizing, and that his amazing genius should have
flowered in such a futile and preposterous creation as the present-
day Methodist Church; a great pity that he could not have developed
a more flexible creed, one that would have grown as the world grew,
instead of standing stock-still and viewing the universe with
intolerant suspicion, with constant bickerings about the wishes of
God and yelping appeals to the Almighty to damn somebody.
But statistically Bishop Asbury is even greater. He preached his first
sermon in America at Philadelphia on the day he set foot on this
continent, in October, 1771, and delivered his final pronouncement
against sin on his deathbed, when, propped upon his pillows, he
expounded the twenty-first chapter of Revelation. In these forty-five
years he preached some 17,000 sermons, and probably 20,000 in his
whole life, for he began preaching when he was about fifteen or
sixteen, some three years after his conversion. The number of words
that he uttered for the Lord is simply incalculable; there is no telling
how far they would reach if they could be laid end to end.
In their methods of preaching and in their intolerance the preachers
of my boyhood, of other sects as well as Methodists, were devout
and faithful followers of Bishop Asbury. The bellowing evangelist of
the Billy Sunday and Lincoln McConnell type is his lineal ecclesiastical
descendant. He preached always at the top of his voice, for he had
great faith in exhortation, and to him the good sermon was the noisy
sermon; even to-day the Preacher who rants and raves is the one
who is regarded by his flock as nearest to God. When Bishop Asbury
was not preaching he was praying; he rose every morning at four
o’clock and prayed and read the Bible until six, when he breakfasted
and set forth on his travels. He would not sleep more than six hours
a night because Wesley had decided that six hours was enough. One
day a week he fasted, and part of another day, punishing his flesh
for the greater glory of the Lord.
This love of self-inflicted punishment affected his whole life. As a boy
he was moody and sensitive; he appears to have been of the type
that complains constantly that he is being “picked on.” He was
introspective, finding his greatest joy in self-pity, and he was never
happy, as we used to say in Missouri, unless he was miserable. His
playmates in the little English school near Birmingham called him
“parson” because of his pious lugubriousness, and when the teacher
beat him or something happened to cross him he sought solace in
prayer.
References to his numerous physical ailments begin to appear in
Bishop Asbury’s Journals about 1772, when he was in his late
twenties. He had never been strong physically, and never after he
came to America was he in good health. He was apparently a
hypochondriac, with all the hypochondriac’s morbid delight in
recounting his symptoms; many pages of his Journals are filled with
them. He took enormous doses of medicine, performed slight
surgical operations upon himself, and raised great blisters on the
slightest provocation, frequently blistering his whole body from
throat to abdomen. Once he preached a whole afternoon with so
many blisters that he was not able either to stand or sit, for he had
blistered not only the soles of his feet but less refined portions of his
anatomy also; he had to be propped up in the pulpit, where he
raved and ranted for hour after hour, saving many sinners. He took
no care of himself whatever, riding horseback through snowstorms
and rainstorms with biting pains in his chest, and with his stomach
and throat filled with ulcers, feverish from pain and religion.
All of these things he notes in his Journals with great gusto, and
gives long lists of the medicines he took and the measures he
employed to combat his sickness. Tartar emetic was his favorite
remedy, and of this he swallowed enormous quantities. For an
ulcerated throat he used a gargle of “sage tea, honey, vinegar and
mustard, and after that another gargle of sage, tea, alum, rose
leaves and loaf sugar to strengthen the parts.” Another favorite
remedy was a diet, as he called it, made from this remarkable
formula: “one quart of hard cider, one hundred nails, a handful of
snake root, a handful of pennell seed, a handful of wormwood.” He
boiled this concoction from a quart to a pint, and drank a wineglass
of it each morning before breakfast for ten days, meanwhile using
no butter, milk or meat. He notes in his Journal that “it will make the
stomach very sick.” It will. I brewed the drink once, and I had as
soon drink dynamite; bootleg gin is nectar by comparison.
There can be little doubt that Bishop Asbury’s physical condition had
a great deal to do with his extraordinary piety, for it is true that most
of the religious leaders have had many things wrong with their
bodies, and that the sicker a man is, the more religious he is likely to
be. A man who is healthy and normal mentally and physically seldom
becomes fanatically religious. True, healthy men sometimes become
monks and preachers, but except in rare instances such men are
comparatively moderate in their views. And generally they do
themselves very well in a material way, especially if they become
monks.
It was once my journalistic duty to make a daily visit to a Franciscan
monastery in Quincy, Illinois, and the good brothers remain a high
light in a somewhat drab period. Jovial and pot-bellied, they were
veritable Friar Tucks in brown bathrobes, extraordinarily hearty
eaters and drinkers, and not even at pre-Volstead banquets have I
ever received as much free food and drink as from the good
Franciscans. It was easy to see why such men as these went in for
religion, but it is not so easy to understand the motive of the
Protestant minister. The earthly rewards are nothing to speak of, and
what with evolution and one thing and another, he can no longer be
certain that there is a Heaven to go to.
The Franciscans were fascinating spectacles as they padded on their
sandaled feet through the gardens of the monastery and along the
graveled paths that led to the church next door. I became
particularly fond of Brother John—I think they called him Brother
John, anyhow I did—who might have stepped from the pages of
Boccaccio. He was the press representative of the monastery; he
always answered my ring, and through the bars of the door I could
see him, waddling genially down the corridor, puffing and rattling his
keys. It always seemed to me that Brother John was miscast;
doubtless he lived a happy and carefree life, though perhaps overly
cluttered with prayer, but I thought it a great pity that he could not
have been an alderman. And what a bartender he would have made!
His paunch would have elected him a City Father, and his fund of
stories would have got him a job in any first-class barroom. But
possibly he has reformed and is now leading some such useful life.
Brother John made but one effort to convert me and induce me to
join the Catholic Church, and when I said “Bunk!” he stopped
immediately and said that inasmuch as I would undoubtedly go to
Hell he would still take advantage of my reportorial capacity to get a
little publicity for the Church before that unfortunate event occurred.
But there was no tolerance in the attitude of my reverend relative,
the Bishop. His outstanding characteristic was intolerance; it shows
in a hundred different acts of his career; he was arbitrary and
domineering. Anyone who was well dressed or who bore any
outward signs of prosperity was offensive in his sight; he preached
the gospel of poverty and self-denial, and believed that all pleasure
was wicked and that self-inflicted suffering was heavenly bliss. He
was imperious and scornful of restraint and opposition; what he said
was true he thought was true, and that was all there was to it.
When men differed with him they were wrong, and he had no
disposition to reopen any question which he had once settled in his
mind. He believed that he was appointed by God to rule the
Methodists in America, and that he was a legitimate successor of the
Apostles. In 1801 he wrote:
“I will tell the world what I rest my authority on; first, divine
authority; second, seniority in America; third, the election of the
General Conference; fourth, my ordination by Thomas Coke, Philip
William Otterbein, Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey; fifth,
because the signs of an Apostle have been seen in me.”
Divine authority and the signs of an Apostle!
Yet his steadfast belief that he was so appointed was one of the
secrets of his power and influence, which were greater than that of
any other churchman of his time. We are even yet feeling their
effects, and we shall continue to feel them. There seems to be no
hope, what with Boards of Temperance, Prohibition and Public
Morals and similar intolerant activities, that the Methodist Church will
ever become more worthy of respect than it was in his day. Indeed,
it grows worse and worse.
Another prime factor in Bishop Asbury’s extraordinary piety, as can
be seen by the entries in his Journals and by a study of the
biographies written by other clergymen, was his terrific mental
turmoil. Throughout his whole life his mind whirled like a pinwheel;
he was constantly in what, back in Missouri, we used to call a
“terrible state.” About the time he began to be ill he started referring
to himself as “Poor Francis,” and thereafter that was the dominant
note of his life. He pitied himself because of his physical ills, and
then dosed himself with horrid medicines, and with bleedings and
blisterings, making his ailments more painful and himself an object
of greater pity. He tortured himself thus physically, and flogged his
mind with constant thoughts of his unworthiness; he was continually
groveling before God, beseeching the Almighty to put temptation in
his path. These extracts taken at random from his Journals show the
trend of his thought:
“I do not sufficiently love God nor live by faith.
“I must lament that I am not perfectly crucified with God.
“I feel some conviction for sleeping too long.
“My heart is grieved and groaneth for want of more holiness.
“Unguarded and trivial conversation has brought a degree of spiritual
deadness.
“My conscience reproves me for the appearance of levity.
“A cloud rested on my mind, which was occasioned by talking and
jesting. I also feel at times tempted to impatience and pride of
heart.
“My heart is still depressed for want of more religion.
“Were I to stand on my own merit, where should I go but to hell?
“Here I received a bitter pill from one of my greatest friends
[referring to his last letter from John Wesley]. Praise the Lord for my
trials also! May they be sanctified.”
Bishop Asbury preached the same doctrine of personal conversion
and sanctification that is preached by present-day Methodist
ministers, and he sought this blissful state for himself with frenzied
zealousness. At times he thought he had entered into what he called
the full fruition of a life with God; at other times he fancied himself
given up to Satan. The older he grew, the gloomier and more
introspective he became, and like most of the other great religionists
he had a pronounced streak of melancholia. He had alternating
periods of exaltation and depression; he was either soaring the
heights of religious ecstasy or floundering in the depths of sin and
despair. He did not seem able to find any middle ground in which he
could obtain a measure of peace and contentment; occasionally in
his Journals he noted that he was happy in God and at peace, but
the next entry showed him groaning in great vexation of spirit,
crying out a doubt of the value of his religious life. He yearned for a
constant religious thrill, and mourned because he could not satisfy
his yearning.
DIVERSIONS OF AN ABANDONED
SINNER
1
Almost immediately after my conversion, or at least as soon as it had
become noised about that I had consigned my holy relative to what
some of our more finicky Sisters, unable to bring themselves to say
“Hell,” referred to coyly as “the bad place,” I abandoned myself to a
life of sin and became a total spiritual loss in the eyes of all
Farmington except members of my immediate family and certain of
my intimate friends who collaborated with me in various wicked but
pleasant enterprises. That is to say, I cast aside the taboos and the
inhibitions that religion had thrown about me, and became for the
first time in my life a normal boy. I existed simply to play and raise
hell generally, and for some curious reason the activity which gave
me the most pleasure was throwing rocks at the church or in some
manner interrupting the service.
It was not long before even the most hopeful had ceased their talk
of sending me to a theological school and fitting me to carry on the
family labors, for I began to smoke cigarettes, play cards, swear,
drink when I could find a bartender willing to ignore the law
forbidding the sale of liquor to a minor, and to cock an appreciative
and appraising eye at the girls. It was then agreed that it was too
late to do anything with me or for me, and on the Sunday morning
that I mounted my new bicycle and rode brazenly past the Southern
Methodist church as the Brothers and Sisters filed with bowed heads
into the edifice for worship, I was consigned body and soul to the
sizzling pits of Hell.
I suffered a great deal of physical agony before I learned to smoke
cigarettes, and it was some time before I learned to blow smoke
through my nose with the nonchalant ease affected by the group of
older boys and young men who loafed in Doss’s barber shop and
around the Post Office Building and McKinney’s peanut and popcorn
machine. My older brother had learned a year or so before, and he
frequently made himself very offensive to me by boasting that he
could smoke a whole package of Sweet Caporals or Drums without
becoming ill. I yearned to try, but he would not give me a cigarette,
and neither would any of the other boys, and my finances were in
such shape that I could not purchase any. And, of course, such
wicked things could not be purchased and charged to my father; I
could have charged a plug of chewing tobacco to him, but not
cigarettes.
But one day I was loafing hopefully in McKinney’s when my brother
came in and produced a dime that he had amassed by laborious
work chopping wood at home, and bought a package of Sweet
Caporal Little Cigars. These were really nothing but cigarettes
wrapped with tobacco instead of paper, but they resembled a cigar
and were thought to be infinitely more stylish and manly than the
ordinary cigarette. I asked him for one, and he said he would not
give one to John the Baptist himself. But I persisted, and followed
him home, aghast at his determination to hide behind the barn and
smoke the whole package one after the other.
“I’ll light one from the end of the other,” he boasted.
Finally as we came opposite Brother Nixon’s house just south of
Elmwood Seminary, he relented and very carefully opened the box
and handed me a Little Cigar. It was a great moment. The yard of
Elmwood Seminary fairly swarmed with girl students, including the
young lady who at the time represented everything that was
desirable in the female sex, and I visioned their cries of startled
admiration as I passed, puffing nonchalantly, blowing smoke from
my nose and perhaps from my ears.
I had no doubt of my ability to handle the innocent-looking Little
Cigar; indeed, at that time I considered no problem insurmountable.
My brother instructed me to fill my mouth with smoke and then take
a long, deep breath, and after that blow the smoke out gently and
slowly, holding the Little Cigar between the first and second finger
and crooking the little finger as we did when we drank tea or coffee,
that being a mark of gentility and refinement. As we came in front of
the old Clardy homestead less than half a block from the Seminary I
struck a match and applied it to the end of the Little Cigar, while my
brother watched anxiously and from time to time gave me advice. I
puffed as he directed.
“Got a mouthful?” he asked.
Unable to speak, my cheeks bulging, I nodded.
“Now take a long breath.”
But, alas, I did not breathe; I swallowed, and while the smoke
penetrated me and spread throughout my interior, it did not take the
correct route. I began to strangle, and my brother got excited.
“Blow it out, you damn fool!” he cried. “You’ll choke!”
I did choke. I did even worse; I became very ill, and the spectacle
which so intrigued the young ladies of the Seminary that day was
not that of a young gentleman going nonchalantly to Hell by the
cigarette route. Instead, they saw a very sick boy rolling on the
sidewalk trying desperately to stem a distressing internal upheaval.
It was several days later before I had enough courage to try again,
and I debated within myself whether or not God had caused me to
be so ill in order to show me that smoking was a sin. But I had
definitely committed myself to the Devil, so a few days later I
begged a dime from my father and bought a package of Drums and
another of Sweet Caporals, the two most popular brands of
cigarettes. With these, and a supply of matches, I went behind the
barn. I made a neat pile of sawdust to lie upon, and there I
remained the whole afternoon, smoking one cigarette after another.
I was terribly ill at first, but gradually improved until the last three or
four gave me no trouble. I did not have much appetite for dinner
that night, but I had conquered the cigarette and I felt a glow of
pride at the fact that I had got a very good start in the direction of
the bad place.
The basis of my overwhelming desire to smoke cigarettes was the
fact that cigarette-smoking when I was a boy in Farmington was one
of the major sins. It ranked with adultery and just a little ahead of
murder and theft. The Preachers called them coffin nails and
delivered violent sermons against them, and every once in a while
an evangelist would come to town with medical charts showing the
effect of tobacco upon the interior human organs. But the fact that it
was bad physically for growing boys was seldom stressed at all; we
were impressed instead with the fact that God thought it a sin to
smoke cigarettes, although it did not appear that it was a sin for the
tobacconist to sell them. That was business.
Many efforts were made to reform me after I had begun to smoke.
My mother said she had hoped I wouldn’t, but that was all she said,
and my father said he did not give a hoot whether I smoked or not,
but that he hoped I would not be a fool and overdo it. He himself
had learned the art of chewing tobacco when he was a boy of seven
in Mississippi, and so far as I have ever been able to learn, God had
never called him to account. He died at the age of seventy-nine,
suddenly, and a slab of plug-cut was in his pocket. It is impossible
for me to believe that God refused him entrance into whatever
Heaven there may be on account of his habit, which he thoroughly
enjoyed.
But the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters did not agree with
my parents, nor would they admit that it was none of their business.
On the contrary, they said that it was the Lord’s business, and since
they were the duly accredited agents of the Lord, appointed by Him
to lead Farmington into the paths of righteousness, it was their
business also. When Brother Fontaine was our Methodist pastor he
did not look with disfavor upon chewing, because he himself was
seldom without a chew and presumably had an indulgence from
God, but he looked upon the cigarette as an invention of the Devil.
In this view he was upheld by the Ladies’ Aid Society and the
Farmington branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. And
the W. C. T. U., with the possible exception of the Methodist Board of
Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, was and is the world’s
best example of an organization maintained for the sole purpose of
minding other people’s business.
The hullabaloo over my smoking only made me more determined to
smoke until my insides turned black and I was called home by Satan
and transformed into a tobacco demon. For that reason I probably
smoked too much. As a matter of principle I always lighted a
cigarette just in front of the Southern Methodist church, and in front
of the home of my uncle, who was an enemy of anything that
provided physical pleasure and contentment. I always smoked
another as I passed the Northern Methodist church, the scene of the
McConnell revival orgy, and still another in front of the Christian
church, in memory of Brother Nations. That was four in half a mile,
and of course was too many, but sometimes I was not permitted to
finish all of them. Frequently a Brother or a Sister, seeing me thus
flaunting my sin on the public highway, snatched the nasty thing
from my mouth and gave me a lecture that dripped religion and was
principally concerned with the fate of boys who defied God and
Jesus Christ by smoking cigarettes. One Sister asked me:
“Where did you get the vile things?”
I told her that I had bought them at her husband’s store, and she
shrieked:
“You saucy, blasphemous boy!”
But on that particular occasion I was not lectured, although she
telephoned my mother that I had been impudent to her. My mother
told her it was too bad.
2
I learned to play pinochle when I was about fifteen, only a few
months after I had become an accomplished cigarette fiend and was
generally considered a fine prospect for Satan, and thereafter was a
regular participant in the game that went on every night in the back
room of Karl Schliesser’s cigar factory. This was a notable den of evil,
and while religion had me in its clutches I thought black magic was
practiced there, and that its habitués had communion with the Devil;
among us it was believed that God had doubtless never heard of the
place or He would have destroyed it with a withering blast of
lightning. It was frequented by Germans and other low forms of life,
and they were principally Catholics and Lutherans, with a sprinkling
of renegade Protestants like myself. The Brothers and Sisters held
the opinion that if this crowd had a God at all he must have been a
very queer being, for bursts of ribald laughter came from Schliesser’s
back room, and there was card-playing, and I do not doubt that
occasionally someone gambled.
Schliesser was the Town Socialist, and was looked upon with grave
suspicion by the better element, as in those days it was generally
recognized that a Socialist was an emissary of the Devil. But the
Brothers and Sisters and the Preachers looked with even more
suspicion upon Victor Quesnel. In this attitude they had the support
of the Catholics. Victor Quesnel was born in France, but he had lived
in Farmington for many years. He frequently quoted Voltaire, and
appeared to believe that a man’s religion and his belief or disbelief in
God was a matter of his own personal taste, and he was therefore
regarded as an atheist. As a matter of fact he was probably more
truly religious than most of the pious Brothers and Sisters; the
principal difference was that he did not try to compel everyone he
met to embrace his creed.
Frequently, and without particular regard as to who heard him,
Quesnel discussed the advantages of sleeping naked, or, as we say
in present-day journalism, undraped. That was his hobby. He said he
thought it was a healthful practice, that he slept better without
clothing, and that come what might he was going to continue to
sleep that way. This was considered heathenish doctrine; some of
our finest church members owned stores in which they sold
nightgowns and pajamas, and it was felt that Quesnel’s attitude was
not only a direct affront to God but was also injurious to business.
Moreover, the Brothers and Sisters did not consider such a practice
modest; there were scores, perhaps hundreds of people in
Farmington who had never in their lives removed all of their clothing.
Once at a meeting of the Ladies’ Aid Society I heard an old Sister
say that she had reached the age of sixty and had never been
entirely undressed; and that when she bathed she kept her eyes
closed as she applied the sponge to her body. A great deal of juicy
conversation could be overheard at these Ladies’ Aid meetings by a
bright young lad who knew where the best keyholes were located.
3
Sunday was much more enjoyable after I had become a sinner and
had left Sunday school and the Church to whatever fate the Lord
had in store for them. I arose a little later, had a leisurely breakfast
and a refreshing quarrel or fight with my brothers and sister, and
then went leisurely to my room and as leisurely put on my Sunday
suit, with no intention of removing it until I retired for the night.
Curiously enough, as soon as I quit going regularly to church and
Sunday school I began to wear my Sunday suit all day, and the little
voice that I had in the selection of this garment I raised in hopeful
pleas for loud checks and glaring colors. No longer did I wish to
clothe myself in the sombre blacks suitable for church wear and
religious activity; I desired to blossom and bloom in the more violent
and pleasant colors of Hell.
Once arrayed in my Sunday suit, I left the house, a cigarette
dangling from my lower lip, and my hat, carefully telescoped in the
prevailing mode, sitting just so on the side of my head. I tried to
time my march downtown so that I would reach Elmwood Seminary
just as the young lady students resident there marched across the
street, after Sunday school, from the Presbyterian church; they were
not permitted to remain at the church during the fifteen or twenty-
minute interval because they attracted such hordes of feverish boys
intent upon everything but religion. Usually I reached the scene in
time, and leaned nonchalantly against the Seminary fence, puffing
vigorously and ostentatiously on a cigarette and winking at various
and sundry of the girls as they passed in their caps and gowns.
For these smart-aleck activities I was presently placed upon the
school’s black list and was not permitted to call upon the one night
each month allotted to such social intercourse, but as I soon learned
to climb a rope ladder this did not annoy me greatly. Anyhow, calling
night at Elmwood Seminary was not very exciting. The procedure
was to place a dozen or so chairs about a big room, in pairs but with
at least twelve inches between them, in which sat the girls and their
callers. In the center sat a gimlet-eyed teacher, constantly ready
with Biblical and other uplifting quotations and seeing to it that
nothing scandalous occurred. From eight to ten the caller was
permitted to engage his lady love in conversation, but it was a rule
that everything that was said must be audible to the teacher on
guard. Whisperings and gigglings were taboo, and resulted in the
young man being placed on the black list, and forbidden thereafter
to darken the doors of the institution. But occasionally the teacher
relaxed her vigilance for a moment, providing an opportunity to
arrange a clandestine meeting. That was the principal reason that
the boys of Farmington went to Elmwood on calling nights.
The regular Sunday incident of the Seminary girls having been
brought to a satisfactory and successful conclusion, I went on
downtown. I was very young then, and I considered myself, in my
Sunday suit, a very striking and elegant figure. I thought of myself
as a parade, and felt morally certain that the eyes of every girl were
upon me, and that their hearts were fluttering with amatory
admiration. The Methodist church was only two blocks south of the
Presbyterian edifice, and I generally reached it as the Sunday-school
pupils trooped out with their arms full of lesson pamphlets and their
souls full of salvation, Golden Texts and catechisms. I regarded them
pityingly, puffed vaingloriously at my symbol of sin, and went on
past the Christian church and the Northern Methodist church and so
to McKinney’s, the Post Office Building and the fascinating popcorn
and peanut machine.
In the winter time Doss’s barber shop was generally open until noon
so Billy Priester could shine the shoes of the young bucks who
proposed to defile the Sabbath by gallivanting around with young
hussies. It was a favorite loafing place for all abandoned wretches
who did not care for the glory that was free in all churches. But in
summer we generally sat in front of McKinney’s and the Post Office
Building and, when finances permitted, ate popcorn and peanuts,
envying Riley Hough as he hurried out now and then to attend to
the machine and stuff his mouth with popcorn before hastening back
into the store.
All of the young sinners of the town loafed there during the church
services, and at twelve o’clock noon we rose in a body and walked
down the street to Pelty’s Book Store, where the Sunday papers
were distributed. The afternoons were devoted to baseball games
and amatory pursuits, and occasionally we went fishing. But this was
considered a Cardinal Sin, and was frowned upon by even our liberal
element; it was felt that it was a desecration of God’s Day to drag
one of His creatures from the river with a cruel fishhook. On week
days, of course, fishing was all right, although a waste of time, but
on Sunday an expedition to Blumeyer’s Ford, or to Gruner’s Hole,
was followed the next morning by buzzing comment all over town,
and only a grown man could hope to indulge in such sinful
adventures and escape subsequent punishment.
4
It was the custom of our pastors and pious brethren, and of the
professional sorcerers who were imported from time to time to cast
their spells and shoo the demons away from our housetops, to
proclaim loudly and incessantly that our collective morals were
compounded of a slice of Sodom and a cut of Gomorrah, with an
extract of Babylon to flavor the sorry stew. They worried constantly
and fretfully over our amorous activities; in their more feverish
discourses appeared significant references to the great difficulty of
remaining pure, and in effect they advised our young women to go
armed to the teeth, prepared to do battle in defense of their
virginity.
In Farmington and other small towns of the Middle West this sort of
thing was the principal stock in trade of those who would lead their
brethren to the worship of the current god; the evangelist assured
his hearers that their town was overrun by harlots, and that brothels
abounded in which prominent men abandoned themselves to
shameful orgies, while church attendance dwindled, and collections
became smaller and smaller, and chicken appeared less and less
frequently upon the ministerial table. His tirades were generally in
this fashion:
“Shall we permit these painted daughters of Jezebel, these
bedizened hussies, to stalk the streets of this fair city and flaunt
their sin in the face of the Lord? Shall we permit them to lure our
sons and brothers into their vile haunts and ply their nefarious trade
in the very shadow of the House of God? No! I say NO! Jesus Christ
must live in this town!”
Immediately everyone shouted “Amen, Brother!” and “Praise the
Lord!” But it was sometimes difficult to determine whether the
congregation praised the Lord for inspiring the evangelist so
courageously to defy the harlots, or for permitting him to discover
them. If the Man of God could find them, why not the damned, too?
Certainly there were always many who wondered if the brother had
acquired any good addresses or telephone numbers since coming to
town. Not infrequently, indeed, he was stealthily shadowed home by
young men eager to settle this question.
These charges and denunciations were repeated, with trimmings, at
the meetings for men only which were always a most interesting
feature of the revivals. At similar gatherings for women, or ladies, as
we called them in small-town journalism, his wife or a devout Sister
discussed the question from the feminine viewpoint. What went on
at these latter conclaves I do not know, though I can guess, for I
have often seen young girls coming out of them giggling and
blushing. The meetings for men were juicy, indeed. The evangelist
discussed all angles of the subject, and in a very free manner. His
own amorous exploits before he was converted were recited in
considerable detail, and he painted vivid word pictures of the
brothels he had visited, both as a paying client and in the course of
his holy work. Almost invariably they were subterranean palaces
hung with silks and satins, with soft rugs upon the floor, and filled
with a vast multitude of handsome young women, all as loose as
ashes. Having thus intimated, with some smirking, that for many
years he was almost the sole support of harlotry, he became
confidential. He leaned forward and said:
“There are such Dens of the Devil right here in your town!”
This was first-hand information, and immediately there was a stir in
the audience, many of his hearers betraying an eagerness to be
gone. But before they could get away the evangelist thundered:
“Shall we permit them to continue their wicked practices?”
I always hoped to be present some day when the audience forgot
itself and answered that question with the thought that was so
plainly in its mind, namely, “Yes!” But, alas, I never heard it,
although there was much shouting of “Amen!” and “Glory to God!”
These meetings for men only were generally held in the afternoon,
and their net result was that the business of the drug store
increased immediately, and when night fell bands of young good-for-
nothings scurried hither and yon about the town, searching
feverishly for the Dens of the Devil. They searched without fear,
confident that modern science would save them from any untoward
consequences, and knowing that no matter what they did they
would go to Heaven if they permitted a preacher to intercede for
them in the end, or a priest to sprinkle them with holy water.
But the Dens of the Devil were not found, neither in Farmington nor
in any other small town in that region, for the very good reason that
they did not exist. The evangelist did not know what he was talking
about; he was simply using stock blather which he had found by
experience would excite the weak-minded to both sexual and
religious emotions. He knew that when they were thus upset they
would be less likely to question his ravings—that they would be more
pliable in his hands and easier to convert.
Our small towns were not overrun by harlots simply because harlotry
could not flourish in a small town. It was economically impossible;
there were not enough cash customers to make the scarlet career
profitable. Also, the poor girls had to meet too much competition
from emotional ladies who had the professional spirit but retained
their amateur standing by various technicalities. And harlots, like the
rest of us, had to live; they required the same sort of raiment and
food that sufficed their virtuous sisters; it was not until they died
that they wore nothing but the smoke of Hell and were able to
subsist on a diet of brimstone and sulphur.
Many men who in larger communities would have patronized the
professionals could not do so in a small town. They could not afford
to; it was too dangerous. The moment a woman was suspected of
being a harlot she was eagerly watched by everyone from the mayor
down to the preachers, and the name of every man seen talking to
her, or even looking at her, went winging swiftly from mouth to
mouth, and was finally posted on the heavenly bulletin board as that
of an immoral wretch. A house in which harlotry was practiced was
picketed day and night by small boys eager to learn the forbidden
mysteries, and by Brethren and Sisters hopefully sniffing for sin. It
was not possible for a harlot to keep her clientèle secret, for the
sexual life of a small town is an open book, and news of amorous
doings could not travel faster if each had a tabloid newspaper.
Exact statistics, of course, are not available, but it is probably true
that no small American town has ever harbored a harlot whose
income from professional services was sufficient to feed and clothe
her. Few if any such towns have ever been the abode of more than
one harlot at a time. When I was a boy every one had its town
harlot, just as it had its town sot (this, of course, was before
drunkards became extinct) and its town idiot. But she was generally
a poor creature who was employed by day as a domestic servant
and practiced her ancient art only in her hours of leisure. She turned
to it partly for economic reasons, but chiefly because of a great
yearning for human companionship, which she could obtain in no
other way. She remained in it because she was almost instantly
branded a Daughter of Satan, and shunned by good and bad alike.
She seldom, if ever, realized that she was doing wrong; her moral
standards were those of a bedbug. She thought of harlotry in terms
of new ribbons and an occasional pair of shoes, and in terms of
social intercourse; she was unmoral rather than immoral, and the
proceeds of her profession, to her, were just so much extra spending
money.
Small-town men who occasionally visited the larger cities, and there
thought nothing of spending from ten to fifty dollars in metropolitan
brothels, were very stingy in dealing with the town harlot. They
considered a dollar an enormous price for her, and frequently they
refused to give her anything. Many small communities were not able
to support even a part-time harlot; consequently some members of
the craft went from town to town, taking secular jobs and practicing
harlotry as a side line until driven out by the godly, or until the
inevitable business depression occurred. I recall one who made
several towns along the O. K. Railroad in Northeastern Missouri as
regularly as the shoe drummers. Her studio was always an empty
box car on the town siding, and she had a mania for inscribing in
such cars the exact dates and hours of her adventures, and her
honoraria. It was not unusual to find in a car some such inscription
as this:
“Ten p.m., July 8. Fifty cents.”
These writings, scrawled in lead pencil or with a bit of chalk, were
signed “Box Car Molly.” Once, in a car from which I had unloaded
many heavy bags of cement, I came across what seemed to be a
pathetic bit of very early, and apparently authentic, Box-Car-
Molliana. On the wall was this:
“I was ruined in this car May 10.
“Box Car Molly.”

Our town harlot in Farmington was a scrawny creature called
variously Fanny Fewclothes and Hatrack, but usually the latter in
deference to her figure. When she stood with her arms outstretched
she bore a remarkable resemblance to the tall hatracks then in
general use in our homes, and since she was always most amiable
and obliging, she was frequently asked to pose thus for the benefit
of drummers and other infidels. In time, she came to take a
considerable pride in this accomplishment; she referred to herself as
a model, and talked vaguely of abandoning her wicked life and going
to St. Louis, where she was sure she could make a living posing for
artists.
Six days a week Hatrack was a competent and more or less virtuous
drudge employed by one of our best families, but Sunday was her
day off, and she then, in turn, offered her soul to the Lord and went
to the Devil. For the latter purpose she utilized both the Masonic and
Catholic cemeteries. Hatrack’s regular Sunday-night parade, her
descent from righteousness into sin, was one of the most fascinating
events of the week, and promptly after supper those of us who did
not have engagements to take young ladies to church (which was
practically equivalent to publishing the banns) went downtown to the
loafing place in front of the Post Office and waited impatiently.
On week days Hatrack turned a deaf ear to the blandishments of our
roués, but on Sunday night she was more gracious. This, however,
was not until she had gone to church and had been given to
understand, tacitly but none the less clearly, that there was no room
for her in the Kingdom of Heaven. Our Sunday-night services usually
began about eight o’clock, following the meetings of the various
young people’s societies. At seven-thirty, regardless of the weather,
the angular figure of Hatrack could be discerned coming down the
hill from the direction of the cemeteries. She lived somewhere in
that section and worked out by the day. She was always dressed in
her best, and in her eyes was the light of a great resolve. She was
going to church, and there was that in her walk and manner which
said that thereafter she was going to lead a better life.
There was always a group of men waiting for her around the Post
Office. But although several muttered “Here she comes!” it was not
good form to speak to her then, and she walked past them as if she
had not seen them. But they, with their wide knowledge of the
vagaries of the Agents of God, grinned hopefully and settled down to
wait. They knew she would be back. She went on up the street past
the Court House and turned into the Northern Methodist church,
where she took a seat in the last row. All about her were empty
seats; if they were not empty when she got there they were soon
emptied. No one spoke to her. No one asked her to come to Jesus.
No one held out a welcoming hand. No one prayed for her. No one
offered her a hymn book. At the protracted meetings and revivals,
which she invariably attended, none of the Brothers and Sisters tried
to convert her; she was a Scarlet Woman and belonged to the Devil.
There was no place for her in a respectable congregation. They
could not afford to be seen talking to her, even in church, where
God’s love, by their theory, made brothers and sisters of us all.
It was pitiful to watch her; she listened to the Word with such rapt
attention; she sang the hymns with such fanatical fervor, and she so
yearned for the comforts of that barbaric religion and the blessings
of easy intercourse with decent people. But she never got them.
From the Christians and their God she got nothing but scorn. Of all
the sinners in our town Hatrack would have been easiest to convert;
she was so pathetically eager for salvation. If a Preacher, or a
Brother, or a Sister, had so much as spoken a kind word to her she
would have dropped to her knees and given up her soul to the
Methodist God. And her conversion, in all likelihood, would have
been permanent, for she was not mentally equipped for a struggle
against the grandiose improbabilities of revealed religion. If someone
had told her, as I was told, that God was an old man with long
whiskers, she would not have called Him “Daddy,” as some of her
more flippant city sisters might have done; she would have accepted
Him and gloried in Him.
But she was not plucked from the burning, for the workers for the
Lord would have nothing to do with her, and by the end of the
service her eyes had grown sullen and her lip had curled upward in a
sneer. Before the final hymn was sung and the benediction
pronounced upon the congregation, she got to her feet and left the
church. None tried to stop her; she was not wanted in the House of
God. I have seen her sit alone and miserably unhappy while the
Preacher bellowed a sermon about forgiveness, with the whole
church rocking to a chorus of sobbing, moaning amens as he told
the stories of various Biblical harlots, and how God had forgiven
them.
But for Hatrack there was no forgiveness. Mary Magdalene was a
saint in Heaven, but Hatrack remained a harlot in Farmington. Every
Sunday night for years she went through the same procedure. She
was hopeful always that someone would speak to her and make a
place for her, that the Brothers and Sisters who talked so volubly
about the grace and the mercy of God would offer her some of the
religion that they dripped so freely over everyone else in town. But
they did not, and so she went back down the street to the Post
Office, swishing her skirts and brazenly offering herself to all who
desired her. The men who had been waiting for her, and who had
known that she would come, leered at her and hailed her with
obscene speech and gesture. And she gave them back leer for leer,
meeting their sallies with giggles, and motioning with her head
toward the cemeteries.
And so she went up the hill. A little while later a man left the group,
remarking that he must go home. He followed her. And a moment
after that another left, and then another, until behind Hatrack was a
line of men, about one to a block, who would not look at one
another, and who looked sheepishly at the ground when they met
anyone coming the other way. As each man accosted her in turn
Hatrack inquired whether he was a Protestant or a Catholic. If he
was a Protestant she took him into the Catholic cemetery; if he was
a Catholic they went into the Masonic cemetery.
5
I fell a willing victim to the wiles of the Rum Demon on the night of
my conversion, and thereafter, in common with other boys of the
town who were aflame with revolt against the religious taboos which
had so oppressed us, I drank whenever I could obtain the liquor.
This was not often, because I seldom had any money and it was
difficult to find a bartender who would sell a drink to a minor. The
eagle eye of the W. C. T. U. was constantly upon him. But
occasionally the darkies would buy for us in return for one swig at
the bottle, and as often as possible we purchased by this means a
pint or quart of whisky or gin. I did not drink because I liked the
taste of liquor, for I didn’t, and I do not now, but I thought it was
smart and manly to get drunk.
And there was another, and a deeper reason. It seemed to me that
in the eyes of the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters a man
could commit no more heinous sin than to get tight; it was even
worse than smoking. Such being the case, I felt that it was
incumbent upon me to achieve that condition, and thereby show
them that I had no use for them and the things for which they
stood. And that was also the reason we sang vulgar songs, and
roared with gusto the parodies on hymns that we learned from time
to time. It was our custom to get as drunk as possible and then
group ourselves about the pump in the courthouse yard, where we
bellowed ditties and parodies until the town marshal or some
outraged Brother or Sister stopped us.
There were few such songs that we did not sing; it was at the pump,
on a summer night, that I first heard the “Song of Jack Hall.” It was
taught to us by a shoe drummer from St. Louis, who sang it with
appropriate gestures, and for a long time it was our favorite song.
The version that we sang was this—it should be rendered with great
gusto and feeling, and the final line of each verse should be dragged
from deep down in the chest:
Oh, me nyme it is Jack Hall, ’tis Jack Hall,

Oh, me nyme it is Jack Hall, ’tis Jack Hall;
Oh, me nyme it is Jack Hall,
And I’ll tell youse one and all,
The story of me fall,
God damn your eyes.
Oh, I killed a man ’tis said, so ’tis said,

Oh, I killed a man ’tis said, so ’tis said;
Oh, I killed a man ’tis said,
And I kicked his bloody head,
And I left him lyin’ dead,
God damn his eyes.
So they chucked me here in quod, here in quod,

So they chucked me here in quod, here in quod;
So they chucked me here in quod,
With a ball and chain and rod,
They did, so help me God,
God damn their eyes.
Well, the parson he did come, he did come,

Well, the parson he did come, he did come;
Well, the parson he did come,
And he looked so God-damned glum,
As he talked of Kingdom Come,
God damn his eyes.
And the sheriff he came, too, he came, too,

And the sheriff he came, too, he came, too;
And the sheriff he came, too,
With his little boys in blue,
He said: “Jack, we’ll see you through,
God damn your eyes.”
So it’s up the rope I go, up I go,

So it’s up the rope I go, up I go;
So it’s up the rope I go,
And those devils down below,
They’ll say: “Jack, we told you so!”
God damn their eyes.
The parodies on hymns that we sang were almost innumerable, and

were undoubtedly sung all over the country by other boys who, in
the eyes of their elders, were only being smart-alecky, but who, like
us, had a deeper reason for the eagerness with which they paraded
their disrespect for the Church and for religion. It was one of the few
ways we knew to flaunt our sin, and nothing pleased us more than
to break up a church service, or at least interrupt it, by bellowing at
the top of our voices some disreputable and unholy parody that had
reached us in one way or another.
One of our most enjoyable Sunday-night escapades was to gather in
a group outside a church window, and sing a parody immediately
after the choir and the congregation inside had sung the hymn itself.
We persisted in this until finally the pastor of the Northern Methodist
church had Wint Jackson, the Night Marshal, chase us away. We
went without comment or objection when Jackson ordered us to
disperse, because he had just killed a desperado named Yates, and
we considered him something of a hero; we thought that he went
about with his finger constantly in the trigger of his revolver, and
that the finger itched.
On this particular night the parody which made the Methodist
minister so angry, and swept from his mind all thought of his
Christian duty to turn the other cheek for us to swat, was on “Oh,
that will be glory for me.” Our version went like this:
Oh, there will be no chicken for me,
No chicken for me, no chicken for me;
When all the preachers have gulped their share,
There’ll be no chicken, no chicken for me.
To give the proper swing to the tune, “gulped” must be pronounced
“gulluped.”
Perhaps the most celebrated of all the parodies, at that time, was on
the favorite old hymn, “At the Bar.” We sang it thus:
At the bar, at the bar,
Where I smoked my first cigar,
And the nickels and the dimes rolled away;
It was there, by chance,
That I ripped my Sunday pants,
And now I can wear them every day.
Another parodied “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” thus:
Nero, my dog, has fleas,
Nero has fleas;
Although I wash him clean,
Nero, my dog, has fleas.
And thus, to the tune of “Hallelujah, Thine the Glory”:
Hellilujah, I’m a hobo,
Hellilujah, I’m a bum;
Hellilujah, give us a handout,
Revive us again.
There was also in circulation at that time a great number of parodies
on hymns in which mention was made of Beecham’s Pills, the merits
of which were emblazoned on every barn and fence throughout the
countryside. I have heard that these parodies were circulated by the
Beecham Pill people themselves in response to a plea of English
churches for hymn books, but I do not know if the story is true. One
of our favorites of this collection was the parody on “Hark, the
herald angels sing.” It went:
Hark, the herald Angels sing,
Beecham’s Pills are just the thing;
Peace on earth and mercy mild,
Two for man and one for child.
6
To my long list of unhallowed but frequently pleasant
accomplishments I added, in my sixteenth summer, journalism and
dancing; I went to work on the Farmington Times and learned to
waltz and two-step, and on occasion danced the Virginia Reel and
the quadrille with spirit and abandon if not with elegant grace. The
practice of journalism was not then, in all quarters, considered a sin
of the first magnitude; nor is it so considered to-day except when
various Preachers and other goody-bodies find their names
mentioned infrequently and their daily denunciations ignored. It is
then the fashion to denounce the newspapers, and to deplore the
low plane to which the fourth estate has fallen. But in Farmington in
my youth the feeling against the Sunday newspaper was so great
that it was felt generally that all journalism was at least slightly
tainted, and so I list it as a sin. So far as the financial rewards go, it
is even now nothing less than a crime.
There was no question about the sinfulness of dancing, especially
the round dances, as we used to call the waltz and two-step. In
some parts of the country exception was made for the square
dances, but everywhere in my section of Missouri the waltz and two-
step were considered Steps toward Hell. I frequently heard
Preachers and Brothers and Sisters pronounce solemn judgment
against young girls who indulged in such heinous practices, and
brand them before God and man as abandoned scarlet women
glorying in the unsanctified embraces of wicked men. That was the
way the Preachers usually talked, too. One man in our town was
even criticized for waltzing with his wife.
Not only was the wicked waltz and the devilish two-step, no matter
how decorously performed, a Sunday taboo in our town, but in our
most religious families it was taboo at all times, and several persons
were dismissed from church for participating in such orgies. We had
one Preacher who informed us that both Sodom and Gomorrah were
destroyed by God because their inhabitants danced and for no other
reason, and the prediction was freely made that Farmington was
destined for the same dreadful end, and he intimated that we would
not even reap the resultant benefits of great fame and publicity. His
tirades were strikingly similar to the ones that are being made every
day now by the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and
Public Morals against New York City and other centers of sin.
As I have said, for many years the Presbyterians, city slickers at
heart, had a virtual monopoly of dancing in Farmington. It was they
who introduced the waltz and the two-step, to the great horror of all
of our old women, both male and female, and it is they who must be
held responsible when God sends His avenging angels to blast and
destroy. Occasionally a Baptist or a Methodist backslid sufficiently to
trip the light fantastic toe, as I delighted to call it as a juvenile
reporter on the Times, but not often; generally the Presbyterians
alone thus flaunted their wickedness. But when God failed to
perform as expected, others became bold and abandoned all
caution, and when I left Farmington, dancing was general and the
town was obviously headed straight for Hell. But even then there
was very little dancing done on Sunday night.
We had two newspapers in Farmington, the Times and the News,
the former owned by Mr. Theodore Fisher and the latter by the
Denman brothers, extraordinarily devout members of the Northern
Methodist church and leaders in most of the town’s religious
activities. Mr. Fisher was a Presbyterian, a liberal at heart, but for
business reasons he was unable to do or say anything to stem the
tide of prying Puritanism. Both papers were controlled by the
churches of the town, and published everything that the Preachers
and the Brothers and Sisters asked them to; as I grew older, Mr.
Fisher became more confidential and frequently expressed his
disgust at many things that went on in Farmington, but he was
powerless. If he had said a word in favor of a more liberal attitude

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Historical Dictionary of Hegelian Philosophy 2nd Edition

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Science and Ultimate Reality Quantum Theory Cosmology and

Statistics and Reality Concepts and Measurements of

Concepts of programming languages 10th Edition Robert W.

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Strategic Issues in International Retailing Concepts and

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1 problems of cartesianism 11 scottish common sense

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McGill-Queen’s University press

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legal deposit second quarter 2013

printed in canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free

McGill-Queen’s University press acknowledges the support of the canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Burbidge, John, 1936–

(McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas, ISSN 0711-0995)

1. idea (philosophy). 2. concepts. 3. Mind and reality. 4. thought and

b105.i28b87 2013 121'.4 c2012-908101-9

this book was typeset by interscript in 10.5/13 new Baskerville.

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16 ideas and concepts 147

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When we approach the study of logic for the first time, we

1 17th edition, 1982.

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translations of Kant or the German idealists, for example, render

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in an attempt to make some systematic sense of this dense and

7 J.W. Burbidge, On Hegel’s Logic: Fragments of a Commentary (atlantic Highlands,

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objectivity required. For logic, the objection reminded me, con-

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unreliable conclusions. But in making that response, i could no lon-

so we must return to Frege’s sharp dichotomy between ideas and

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his challenge to “psychologism.” in chapter 2, i consider how the

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Frege and Psychologism

We start with Gottlob Frege, who originally identified the

1 “review of Husserl’s Philosophie der Arithmetik” [317], reprinted in G. Frege,

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3 “review of Husserl,” 79.

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6 Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, i, xv–xvi, in Frege Reader, ed. Beaney, 202–3.

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10 in Frege Reader, ed. Beaney, 302 (my italics).