Appendix 10. - (196)

The careful reader will readily notice that, although I consider Nominalism a totally untrue system, I do not subscribe to Conceptualism. Nor do I like to call myself a Realist because this word, along with Nominalist and Conceptualist, does not express single, precise opinions, but rather a body of various opinions. In fact, according to John of Salisbury, Realists were divided into six different categories, and Conceptualists and Nominalists also had their different factions. The acceptance, therefore, of such a vague title would either be useless, or involve supporting a faction and taking sides without clearly understanding why. As I have remarked elsewhere, the history of philosophy will never come to perfection until we begin to classify philosophical systems by providing an exact description of their views, not by labelling them with the names of their authors or factions. (Extract from a letter on the classification of philosophical systems in Introduction, etc., 4, 1).

However, let me indicate briefly what I mean by saying that I do not subscribe to the Conceptualists' position. It is clear that this name can be aptly used to designate those who define a universal as a mental concept in such a way that nothing the mind thinks with a universal exists outside the mind. This form of subjectivism is far removed from my view.
I take a universal idea and subject it to analysis. Such analysis furnishes me with two elements from which my idea is derived: 1. the quality thought of; 2. its universality, which St. Thomas also distinguishes and calls intentio universalitatis.
I maintain that there is, corresponding to the quality thought of, a reality in the individual thing; corresponding to the universality thought of, there is nothing real in the thing: this universality is solely in the mind.
Universality is not, properly speaking, the quality thought of, but a mode which it takes in the mind; it is necessary to make this distinction very clear.

How does the quality thought of become a universal within me? When my spirit has perceived any quality whatsoever, it has the power to replicate this quality in an indefinite number of individual entities by means of a corresponding number of acts of thought with which it thinks that quality successively or simultaneously in an indefinite number of individuals. This power derives from two principles; 1. from an intuition of what is possible, possessed by my spirit, and 2. from the iterative capacity of acts of the spirit.

The power of replicating acts of thought, and thus imagining the quality as indefinitely replicated, is a faculty unique to the spirit. It is the spirit, therefore, which, by means of its faculty, adds the character of universality to the quality which it thinks of. This universality signifies only the possibility which a quality has of being thought by us in an indefinite number of individuals.
I cannot resist adding that if Degerando had clearly seen the difference between maintaining that universal ideas are pure concepts and admitting that only the universality of ideas exists solely in the mind while the ideas themselves, relative to the qualities they express, have a real correspondence in things, he would not have said that St. Thomas was a true conceptualist (Histoire comparée etc. 2nd ed., vol. 4, p. 498), a title which he claims also applies to Ockham (ibid., p. 582), who is very far from holding the philosophical ideas of St. Thomas.