Has the intellect a function? : a lecture given at the institute of pathology, St. Mary's Hospital, on June 20 / by Wilfred Trotter.

  • Wilfred Trotter
Date:
[1939]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Has the intellect a function? : a lecture given at the institute of pathology, St. Mary's Hospital, on June 20 / by Wilfred Trotter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    1] of the correspondence between the abstraction and the reality. For a long time it seemed that the qualities of space could also be completely abstracted because the conclusions derived from the abstract consideration of space seemed to be confirmed every- where in the outer world even on the astronomical scale, Ultimately however it dawned on the geometers that there is a discrepancy between the abstraction and the reality. The need of an Einstein to point this out and the uproar that followed are perhaps a little surprising to mere common sense. What seems truly remarkable is not that intuitions derived from the stretch of the arms and the range of the eye should ultimately break down, but that their validity is so wide and their error so small. When we apply the abstract method to events of the living world as we constantly do and must, we find ourselves faced by a great increase in the individuality of phenomena and should be prepared for a sudden drop in the representative value of all abstractions. The abstraction ‘‘ man’ must always be a thin, imperfect, and easily misleading summary of the innumerable individual ‘‘ men.” It is in the world of ideas however that the abstract makes its highest flights and develops to the full its fascinations and its dangers. Truth, justice, honour, beauty, being, right, wrong; I give a mere random list of abstractions from that world. These are no mere manageable equivalents designed for convenience of thought. They are creations which, made in all innocence, have taken on a life of their own and become the rulers of the mind. Could there be a more plausible and useful-looking conception than that of ‘‘ truth ’—a unitary principle that is to be the ultimate sanction at once of the statesman and the theologian, the man of science and the poet? Yet it is easy to make out that such a supposed unity can never be, and that behind its solemn frontage is a mere jumble of ideas. Nevertheless this bogus unit has notoriously had a strange power over man’s mind and proved itself to be perhaps the most disastrous idol he has ever set up. Abstraction of some degree is universal and inveterate in all kinds of thinking; in philosophic thinking however it is in addition characteristic and indispensable. The aim of philosophy is to unify all knowledge; it must therefore seek the generality it supposes to lie behind the multitudinous particulars of experience. In thus separating reality from its accidents it must depend on the abstract
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