Universal and Particular

The idea of universal and particular gathers several old questions. What do we name when we say “man,” “horse” or “triangle”? Does anything answer to such a word except the many individual men, horses and figures we meet? How do kinds come to be distinguished and ranked? How does the mind move from the instances it observes to the laws it states, and back again? And what is the poet doing when an imagined person seems truer to human nature than any real person recorded in a chronicle? These books take up the idea in philosophy, in the history of language, in natural science, in the theory of knowledge and in criticism, and the questions in each field bear on the others. The nominalist who holds that only individuals exist must still explain the naturalist’s genera. The critic who praises a character as a species must say what a species is. The idea is great here because almost no serious inquiry in these volumes can avoid it.

The sharpest position in the collection is the denial of real universals. Hobbes states it without qualification. Nothing in the world is universal but names, he holds, and the things named are all individual. A universal name is simply one imposed on many things for some likeness among them¹. He carries the point into his classification of names, where “general” and “universal” turn out to be names of names, not of things². Berkeley gives the same view a metaphysical edge. Philonous argues that whatever exists is particular, so that motion or extension in general cannot exist in corporeal substance³. We may frame general propositions about extension, he allows, but that is a different thing from possessing a distinct abstract idea of extension without any particular size or figure⁴. An abstract notion of entity, cut off from every particular thing, cannot be conceived at all⁵. Berkeley uses the argument as a weapon against material substance, which on his reading is nothing but the most abstract of such pretended ideas.

Hume accepts the critique and gives it its most influential psychological form. He rejects abstraction outright: a triangle in general, with sides neither equal nor unequal, cannot be conceived⁶. Whatever generality our thinking has comes, he says, from attaching particular ideas to a general term. The word “horse” calls up particular horses, and the custom joining the word to many such images does the work that an abstract idea was supposed to do⁷. In Hobbes, Berkeley and Hume, then, generality is moved from things and from ideas into language and habit. The three part on emphasis. Hobbes makes names the whole of universality¹. Berkeley concedes general propositions while denying general ideas⁴. Hume keeps the particular image and explains its general use⁷. What they share is the conviction that the world contains only individuals.

If general names are human impositions, one may ask how they arose, and Rousseau supplies a conjectural history. The first men, he supposes, gave each individual its own name, with no thought of genus or species. To class beings under common names required a knowledge of their properties and differences that savages did not possess⁸. Early namers therefore multiplied individual names, and when they did attempt general ones they made too few genera and species, because they lacked the knowledge of differences that sound classing requires⁹. Rousseau’s account agrees with the nominalists that the first realities known were individuals. Yet it also implies that good general names depend on real knowledge of what things share and how they differ, and so on something more than arbitrary convention.

That implication brings forward the opposite tendency, the sense that kinds are real and that the essence of a kind is something the mind reaches only with difficulty. More’s Utopians, ingenious in much else, are reported as unable to conceive “man himself in common,” though individual men stand before them in plain view¹⁰. The remark gently mocks the schoolmen’s abstractions, and it also concedes how elusive the common nature is. Manzoni’s narrator confesses that essence and universals are not so clear as people imagine¹¹. Mill, recounting his intellectual development, reports that he came to recognise kinds as real in nature and not mere conveniences of classification¹². Taken together, these passages put the question back where the nominalists thought they had closed it. A kind may be hard to conceive apart from its members and still be no fiction.

Natural science is where this question becomes concrete, and Darwin is its chief witness in these books. He describes living things as falling into groups subordinate to groups. Varieties cluster into species, species into genera, genera into families and families into classes, all nested by affinity¹³ and arranged by degrees of difference¹⁴. He gives this familiar hierarchy a new ground. Organic beings, unlike minerals, group themselves by genealogy, so that the nesting of species within genera, families, orders and classes records descent¹⁵. The consequence for classification is momentous. Since the groups are branches of one history, the lines between them are not fixed. The divisions between orders and classes are revised as fossil links dissolve apparent gaps¹⁶. For Darwin a kind is real in being a lineage, and it is also provisional, since its boundaries depend on what the record has preserved.

The strain shows in the distinction between generic and specific characters. Darwin contrasts the characters common to a whole group with those that mark single species¹⁷, and he notes that the two differ in variability¹⁸. The ranking of forms becomes a matter of judgment. Of the domestic pigeons he observes that an ornithologist meeting them wild would rank the breeds as distinct species, perhaps even as separate genera¹⁹. Emerson draws a similar moral about human races, whose classifications he treats as convenient categories, not exact and final²⁰. Here the naturalist and the essayist touch the nominalist position from another side. They do not deny that resemblances are real; they doubt that our ranks of resemblance mark fixed divisions in nature.

From the nature of kinds the inquiry passes to the movement of the mind between general and particular. Harvey warns against generalizing from too few cases. To reason about the motion of the heart from one body, he says, is like judging all polity from one commonwealth or all agriculture from one field²¹. Pascal, reflecting on demonstration, sees the dependence running in both directions. A general theorem needs a particular case to be demonstrated, and the particular case needs the general rule²²; demonstration is a passage back and forth between the two²³. In theology he puts the same distinction to work, using the difference between what holds in communi and what holds in particulari to correct doctrinal errors²⁴.

Others doubt that instances can ever yield the general by themselves. Schiller holds that the general cannot issue from the individual without an independent faculty²⁵. Emerson finds that faculty wanting in the English, who in his account accumulate facts but lack the power to generalize by deep insight into laws. He sets them against Plato, Aristotle and the Germans²⁶. Mill’s Autobiography shows the opposite failing. He learned to test general statements by particular instances, and he judged that his father trusted the abstract too much when it was not embodied in the concrete²⁷. Between Harvey’s caution about narrow induction, Emerson’s complaint about induction without insight and Mill’s complaint about insight without instances, the collection maps both dangers. Facts without law are blind, and law without cases is empty.

A further group of passages holds that the universal is present within the individual itself, not reached by leaving the individual behind. Emerson declares that every trifle bristles with eternal law, and that one design unites the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench²⁸. We are enslaved to particulars, he grants, yet we carry innate universal laws, and these are embodied in nature²⁹. Schiller seeks the absolute and permanent in individual, variable cases by suppressing their accidental limits³⁰. In the moral order he holds that acting on principle makes a particular case the law of all possible cases, so that the individual rises to the species³¹. Yet Schiller also insists that the state must respect what is subjective and specific in individuals as well as what is generic³². The universal is to be honoured without the particular being swallowed.

Thoreau turns the relation sceptically and socially. He suggests that for common men knowledge of the genus or race would suffice to know the individual, since we deny them characters of their own³³. Taine locates human diversity in the interval between particular representation and universal conception³⁴. On his view, what distinguishes peoples and minds is how far they move from one to the other.

The ancient question that reappears most clearly in these volumes concerns poetry. Sidney sets the poet between the philosopher and the historian. The philosopher stands on the abstract and general, the historian on the particular, and each halts without the other³⁵. The poet couples the general notion with the particular example³⁶. Restating the classical doctrine, Sidney says that poetry deals with the universal, with what is fitting by likelihood or necessity, while history tells what Alcibiades did³⁷. Shelley takes up the contrast in a Romantic key. A story, he writes, is partial and particular to a period, while poetry is universal and applies to all possible varieties of human nature³⁸. Both critics place the higher truth on the side of the universal. Both also make it a universal seen in a concrete image, unlike the bare abstraction Sidney assigns to the philosopher.

Criticism of character carries the thought further. Johnson observes that other poets’ characters are individuals, while Shakespeare’s are species³⁹. Shakespeare attends to essential character over the adventitious distinctions of country and condition⁴⁰. Coleridge defines essence as the universal in the individual, and he holds that a good portrait abstracts the personal⁴¹. These critics are close to Schiller’s suppression of accidental limits³⁰ and Emerson’s law in every trifle²⁸. They stand at a distance from the nominalists. Hume could not form the idea of a triangle in general⁶, yet Johnson can find in a single Shakespearean figure the type of a whole order of men³⁹. The poet’s universal is not a disembodied idea. It is an individual so presented that it stands for many, which is close to what Hume said a general idea is⁷.

Several questions remain open across these texts. One is whether the generality of kinds lies in names¹, in habits of the mind⁷ or in nature itself¹². Darwin’s genealogical account offers a middle ground, in which groups are real as lines of descent but have no fixed boundaries^15,16. A second is whether the passage from instances to laws rests on the instances alone or on a faculty that goes beyond them^25,26. Harvey and Mill press the claims of cases^21,27, while Emerson and Schiller press the claims of insight. A third is whether the essence a poet or painter captures is the same kind of thing as the species a naturalist ranks or the common nature a metaphysician seeks. The texts do not agree on it, though Coleridge’s phrase about the universal in the individual⁴¹ suggests that the artist may grasp intuitively what the philosopher finds hard to define^11,10. The ancients placed the universal above history. The moderns doubted that it existed apart from names, then found it again in lineages, in laws within trifles and in characters that are species. Across all these positions, the individual and the general remain hard to think of apart.