ABSTRACT
Returning to the usage of ideas as contents of assertion or suggestion, we have to ask now what they contain. Clearly, from our definition, whatever can be asserted or even suggested of reality, can be the content of an idea, and becomes such when not merely asserted, but also referred to as the content of an assertion. It is usual to divide our assertions into Particular or General, and ideas will accordingly fall under the same heads. Ideas of particular facts will be simply the content of our ordinary memories, and constructions of memories, and their nature and genesis need not therefore give us any further difficulty. We need only remark a difference between the idea of a strictly particular fact and that of an individual person or thing. The particular fact may, at least, be given in a single act of apprehension. The individual person or thing is certainly a content involving many apprehended data, and we shall see later that the mere construction of these data is insufficient without inference to explain all that we actually mean by ideas of this class. It will be sufficient for the present to indicate that these ideas refer to special wholes of facts connected each by its own appropriate nexus in a manner that will demand description later on.
