Dec 26 2008
The Fundamental difficulties of the Philosophy of Dugald Stewart (Article 11)
Article 11
Ninth Defect: Smith, while professing to explain abstract ideas, gives no such explanation at all.
156. Thus far our consideration has been restricted to the progress of language, on the supposition that man was its author. We have therefore examined only the external product of the interior operation of the mind, and said nothing as yet of how and by means of what faculties this operation must proceed so that it may end in that external result. If we can succeed in correctly describing all this, the progressive steps which we have detailed as taking place in the formation of language will have received an adequate and satisfactory explanation.
Most men are satisfied with seeing the process of the mind described in tis outward manifestation; because their attention is absorbed by the external forms of the discourse. This is so much the case that even such a thinker as Dugald Stewart, when wishing to account for the formation of genera and species, unhesitatingly endorses the views expressed on the subject in the passage he has quoted from Smith, and declares that “Smith’s account appears to him to be equally simple and satisfactory.”
Now, I will admit, for the moment, that the whole of what Smith says in that passage is true, and that man did really pass from proper to common or appellative names. But I am still at a loss to see that our author has in any way explained the manner in which man forms those assortments of individuals which he afterwards calls genera and species. To tell us that man passes from proper to common names is not as yet to inform us what takes place in his mind. It is not to examine the interior operation corresponding to that transformation of names, nor to seek what faculties must necessarily be supposed for such an operation-in a word, it is not to give us any clue to the solution of those difficulties which, as Dugald Stewart himself says, have caused some philosophers to look upon the formation of genera and species as one of the most perplexing problems in metaphysics.
