ABSTRACT
Essentially the same idea is found in many recent writers, who define substantives like "whiteness" with slight variations as "fictitiously substantival words," "names of only imaginary substances," "vorstellungen, welche als selbstandige gegenstande gedacht werden," " gegenstiLndlich gedachte begriffe," etc., " mere names, thought of, and consequently grammatically treated as if they were independent things" (Noreen VS 5. 256 £.1). In spite of this consensus I must confess that when I speak of a young girl's beauty or of an old man's wisdom, I do not think of these qualities as " things" or " real objects"; these are to me only other ways of expressing the thought that she is beautiful and he is wise. When Wundt says that humanity (menschlichkeit) denotes a quality just as much as human does, he is perfectly right, but not so when he adds that the substantival form makes it easier to treat this quality in our thoughts as an object (gegenstand). Misteli avoids this fiction and lays stress exclusively on the grammatical treatment, but no one really explains how and why all le,nguages come to have such substantives for adjectival notions.
