This itself is a highly abstract way of stating my complaint, and it needs to be redeemed from obscurity by showing instances of what is meant.  Some beliefs very dear to my own heart have been conceived in this viciously abstract way by critics.  One is the ’will to believe,’ so called; another is the indeterminism of certain futures; a third is the notion that truth may vary with the standpoint of the man who holds it.  I believe that the perverse abuse of the abstracting function has led critics to employ false arguments against these doctrines, and often has led their readers to false conclusions.  I should like to try to save the situation, if possible, by a few counter-critical remarks.

Let me give the name of ‘vicious abstractionism’ to a way of using concepts which may be thus described:  We conceive a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and classing it under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use our concept privatively; reducing the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken, treating it as a case of ‘nothing but’ that concept, and acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged. [Footnote:  Let not the reader confound the fallacy here described with legitimately negative inferences such as those drawn in the mood ‘celarent’ of the logic-books.] Abstraction, functioning in this way, becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance in thought.  It mutilates things; it creates difficulties and finds impossibilities; and more than half the trouble that metaphysicians and logicians give themselves over the paradoxes and dialectic puzzles of the universe may, I am convinced, be traced to this relatively simple source.  The viciously privative employment of abstract characters and class names is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind.

To proceed immediately to concrete examples, cast a glance at the belief in ‘free will,’ demolished with such specious persuasiveness recently by the skilful hand of Professor Fullerton. [Footnote:  Popular Science Monthly, N. Y., vols. lviii and lix.] When a common man says that his will is free, what does he mean?  He means that there are situations of bifurcation inside of his life in which two futures seem to him equally possible, for both have their roots equally planted in his present and his past.  Either, if realized, will grow out of his previous motives, character and circumstances, and will continue uninterruptedly the pulsations of his personal life.  But sometimes both at once are incompatible with physical nature, and then it seems to the naive observer as if he made a choice between them now, and that the question of which future is to be, instead of having been decided at the foundation of the world, were decided afresh at every passing moment in I which fact seems livingly to grow, and possibility seems, in turning itself towards one act, to exclude all others.