Some have denied that we can have any ideas of sepa rate qualities. It must be granted, as has been already observed, that the human mind has a strong propensity to conjoin different qualities mutually as objects of thought, and thus form conceptions of compound individuals. We mentioned, however, that it ought to be recollected, that a person whose sensibilities are only as yet beginning to be unfolded has separate perceptions of the different qualities. It is now further to be observed that any person, even one whose habits of association arc most inveterate, may direct his chief attention to one particular quality. Others may indeed involuntarily intrude in combination with it, or he may have occasion to think of the relations in which it stands to others ; but this one in particular is distinguished as the chief object of his attention, and is also thought of with constancy, while the others with which it is accidently associated are both less attended to and in themselves va rying. We therefore see no impropriety in saying that this is a separate object of thought. We are certainly en
titled to regard it as a separate subject of discourse. It is this alone that gives origin to such terms, and confers on them all their meaning and utility. If the present were a proper occasion for entering on such disquisitions, we might spew that even the names of concrete objects do not always excite in the mind the same constant and definite ideas, which are, on mature consideration, attached to them. When a concrete noun implies many ideas, we do not think of the whole of them. When it implies very few, we think of something else with which we suppose them to be in contact. It is seldom that the mind is occupied with the full meaning of any word, to the total exclusion of other ideas. Very little difference, therefore, exists betwixt our mode of conceiving the objects signified by concrete and those signified by abstract nouns. The com paratively complicated form of the latter arises from the comparative recency of the period at which a distinction becomes requisite, for denoting single qualities as the prin cipal subjects of discourse.