ABSTRACT
Aristotle, and after him, Thomas Aquinas and his school, considered concepts (horse, mind, justice) as a species intelligibiles, as individual unmeaningful conscious contents which show us the essence of the things. They relied on the unquestioned observation that we experience in hearing such abstract words a quite positive conscious content. The experimental and pathological experiences in understanding words confirm these early investigators. The unstructured perception of a clang passes over into a structured apprehension of words, and finally to a meaningful understanding. None of these stages can be denied. The followers of Thomas Aquinas also emphasized, in contrast with the nominalists, that the significance of abstract words does not proceed from the word clang as such. It is also never given again in a fantasm, for each fantasm, each palpable image, is individual, while concepts are essentially general, for their content can be applied unchanged to each individual. Thomas Aquinas, therefore, really anticipated the conflict between Locke and Berkeley. Experience, however, has taught us also to recognize the indispensability of palpable images. Both these facts are united in the theory that the understanding can recognize something in the circumstance at hand only by turning toward fantasms. What was said above presents very clearly what a theory of concepts has to achieve. It must be able to explain from where the generally valid conscious contents which cannot be replaced by any clear image come; and how the hindering of thinking, in consequence of the hindering of images, fits in with these facts.
