By sensuous perception we obtain, according to Plato, an imperfect knowledge of individual objects; by our general concepts, or notions, we reach a higher knowledge of the idea of these objects. But what is the character of the idea itself? What is its relation to the individual object? And what is its relation to the author or originator of the individual things?[1]
We use the term individual thing (or individual object) when we denote an example or exemplar that is of a kind. Individual objects in reality are for example the Eiffel tower, the M1 motorway, my car and John Doe.[2]
The conceptualist holds that universals have a real existence, but only in the mind, as the concepts which unite the individual things: e.g. there is in the mind a general notion or idea of boats, by reference to which the mind can decide whether a given object is, or is not, a boat.[3]
{For example, the notion of conflict (πόλεμος) as the father of all things and of harmony as arising out of a union of discords, and again of an endeavour by individual things to maintain themselves in permanence against the universal process of destruction and renovation, cannot but remind one of certain fundamental ideas in Darwin’s theory of evolution.[4]
The surrounding universe manifests itself to us, at all events at first sight, as a plurality, a collection of individual things. We recognize as individually distinct beings a multiplicity of material objects - animals, men, and the like. We speak of the stacks of corn or the stones scattered over a field as so many individual things.[5]
