Chapter IX. The World of Universals

by Bertrand Russell

　　At the end of the preceding chapter we saw that such entities as relationsappear to have a being which is in some way different from that ofphysical objects, and also different from that of minds and from that ofsense-data. In the present chapter we have to consider what is the natureof this kind of being, and also what objects there are that have this kindof being. We will begin with the latter question.

　　The problem with which we are now concerned is a very old one, since itwas brought into philosophy by Plato. Plato's 'theory of ideas' is anattempt to solve this very problem, and in my opinion it is one of themost successful attempts hitherto made. The theory to be advocated in whatfollows is largely Plato's, with merely such modifications as time hasshown to be necessary.

　　The way the problem arose for Plato was more or less as follows. Let usconsider, say, such a notion as justice. If we ask ourselves whatjustice is, it is natural to proceed by considering this, that, and theother just act, with a view to discovering what they have in common. Theymust all, in some sense, partake of a common nature, which will be foundin whatever is just and in nothing else. This common nature, in virtue ofwhich they are all just, will be justice itself, the pure essence theadmixture of which with facts of ordinary life produces the multiplicityof just acts. Similarly with any other word which may be applicable tocommon facts, such as 'whiteness' for example. The word will be applicableto a number of particular things because they all participate in a commonnature or essence. This pure essence is what Plato calls an 'idea' or'form'. (It must not be supposed that 'ideas', in his sense, exist inminds, though they may be apprehended by minds.) The 'idea' justiceis not identical with anything that is just: it is something other thanparticular things, which particular things partake of. Not beingparticular, it cannot itself exist in the world of sense. Moreover it isnot fleeting or changeable like the things of sense: it is eternallyitself, immutable and indestructible.

　　Thus Plato is led to a supra-sensible world, more real than the commonworld of sense, the unchangeable world of ideas, which alone gives to theworld of sense whatever pale reflection of reality may belong to it. Thetruly real world, for Plato, is the world of ideas; for whatever we mayattempt to say about things in the world of sense, we can only succeed insaying that they participate in such and such ideas, which, therefore,constitute all their character. Hence it is easy to pass on into amysticism. We may hope, in a mystic illumination, to see the ideas as wesee objects of sense; and we may imagine that the ideas exist in heaven.These mystical developments are very natural, but the basis of the theoryis in logic, and it is as based in logic that we have to consider it.

　　The word 'idea' has acquired, in the course of time, many associationswhich are quite misleading when applied to Plato's 'ideas'. We shalltherefore use the word 'universal' instead of the word 'idea', to describewhat Plato meant. The essence of the sort of entity that Plato meant isthat it is opposed to the particular things that are given in sensation.We speak of whatever is given in sensation, or is of the same nature asthings given in sensation, as a particular; by opposition to this,a universal will be anything which may be shared by manyparticulars, and has those characteristics which, as we saw, distinguishjustice and whiteness from just acts and white things.

　　When we examine common words, we find that, broadly speaking, proper namesstand for particulars, while other substantives, adjectives, prepositions,and verbs stand for universals. Pronouns stand for particulars, but areambiguous: it is only by the context or the circumstances that we knowwhat particulars they stand for. The word 'now' stands for a particular,namely the present moment; but like pronouns, it stands for an ambiguousparticular, because the present is always changing.

　　It will be seen that no sentence can be made up without at least one wordwhich denotes a universal. The nearest approach would be some suchstatement as 'I like this'. But even here the word 'like' denotes auniversal, for I may like other things, and other people may like things.Thus all truths involve universals, and all knowledge of truths involvesacquaintance with universals.

　　Seeing that nearly all the words to be found in the dictionary stand foruniversals, it is strange that hardly anybody except students ofphilosophy ever realizes that there are such entities as universals. We donot naturally dwell upon those words in a sentence which do not stand forparticulars; and if we are forced to dwell upon a word which stands for auniversal, we naturally think of it as standing for some one of theparticulars that come under the universal. When, for example, we hear thesentence, 'Charles I's head was cut off', we may naturally enough think ofCharles I, of Charles I's head, and of the operation of cutting off hishead, which are all particulars; but we do not naturally dwell upon whatis meant by the word 'head' or the word 'cut', which is a universal: Wefeel such words to be incomplete and insubstantial; they seem to demand acontext before anything can be done with them. Hence we succeed inavoiding all notice of universals as such, until the study of philosophyforces them upon our attention.

　　Even among philosophers, we may say, broadly, that only those universalswhich are named by adjectives or substantives have been much or oftenrecognized, while those named by verbs and prepositions have been usuallyoverlooked. This omission has had a very great effect upon philosophy; itis hardly too much to say that most metaphysics, since Spinoza, has beenlargely determined by it. The way this has occurred is, in outline, asfollows: Speaking generally, adjectives and common nouns express qualitiesor properties of single things, whereas prepositions and verbs tend toexpress relations between two or more things. Thus the neglect ofprepositions and verbs led to the belief that every proposition can beregarded as attributing a property to a single thing, rather than asexpressing a relation between two or more things. Hence it was supposedthat, ultimately, there can be no such entities as relations betweenthings. Hence either there can be only one thing in the universe, or, ifthere are many things, they cannot possibly interact in any way, since anyinteraction would be a relation, and relations are impossible.

　　The first of these views, advocated by Spinoza and held in our own day byBradley and many other philosophers, is called monism; the second,advocated by Leibniz but not very common nowadays, is called monadism,because each of the isolated things is called a monad. Both theseopposing philosophies, interesting as they are, result, in my opinion,from an undue attention to one sort of universals, namely the sortrepresented by adjectives and substantives rather than by verbs andprepositions.

　　As a matter of fact, if any one were anxious to deny altogether that thereare such things as universals, we should find that we cannot strictlyprove that there are such entities as qualities, i.e. theuniversals represented by adjectives and substantives, whereas we canprove that there must be relations, i.e. the sort of universalsgenerally represented by verbs and prepositions. Let us take inillustration the universal whiteness. If we believe that there issuch a universal, we shall say that things are white because they have thequality of whiteness. This view, however, was strenuously denied byBerkeley and Hume, who have been followed in this by later empiricists.The form which their denial took was to deny that there are such things as'abstract ideas '. When we want to think of whiteness, they said, we forman image of some particular white thing, and reason concerning thisparticular, taking care not to deduce anything concerning it which wecannot see to be equally true of any other white thing. As an account ofour actual mental processes, this is no doubt largely true. In geometry,for example, when we wish to prove something about all triangles, we drawa particular triangle and reason about it, taking care not to use anycharacteristic which it does not share with other triangles. The beginner,in order to avoid error, often finds it useful to draw several triangles,as unlike each other as possible, in order to make sure that his reasoningis equally applicable to all of them. But a difficulty emerges as soon aswe ask ourselves how we know that a thing is white or a triangle. If wewish to avoid the universals whiteness and triangularity, weshall choose some particular patch of white or some particular triangle,and say that anything is white or a triangle if it has the right sort ofresemblance to our chosen particular. But then the resemblance requiredwill have to be a universal. Since there are many white things, theresemblance must hold between many pairs of particular white things; andthis is the characteristic of a universal. It will be useless to say thatthere is a different resemblance for each pair, for then we shall have tosay that these resemblances resemble each other, and thus at last we shallbe forced to admit resemblance as a universal. The relation ofresemblance, therefore, must be a true universal. And having been forcedto admit this universal, we find that it is no longer worth while toinvent difficult and unplausible theories to avoid the admission of suchuniversals as whiteness and triangularity.

　　Berkeley and Hume failed to perceive this refutation of their rejection of'abstract ideas', because, like their adversaries, they only thought of qualities,and altogether ignored relations as universals. We have thereforehere another respect in which the rationalists appear to have been in theright as against the empiricists, although, owing to the neglect or denialof relations, the deductions made by rationalists were, if anything, moreapt to be mistaken than those made by empiricists.

　　Having now seen that there must be such entities as universals, the nextpoint to be proved is that their being is not merely mental. By this ismeant that whatever being belongs to them is independent of their beingthought of or in any way apprehended by minds. We have already touched onthis subject at the end of the preceding chapter, but we must now considermore fully what sort of being it is that belongs to universals.

　　Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here wehave a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relationsubsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know thatEdinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to doonly with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of theproposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend afact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surfacewhere Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands,even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and evenif there were no minds at all in the universe. This is, of course, deniedby many philosophers, either for Berkeley's reasons or for Kant's. But wehave already considered these reasons, and decided that they areinadequate. We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mentalis presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But thisfact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it wouldbe impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anythingmental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates,is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world whichthought apprehends but does not create.

　　This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in whichEdinburgh and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relationexist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or timewhere we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburghany more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as betweenthem. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everythingthat can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at someparticular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different fromsuch things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material normental; yet it is something.

　　It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universalswhich has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We canthink of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectlyordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that weare thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said thatwhiteness is 'in our mind'. We have here the same ambiguity as we noted indiscussing Berkeley in Chapter IV. In the strict sense, it is notwhiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. Theconnected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time,also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense inwhich it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come tothink that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act ofthought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in sothinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man'sact of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; oneman's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from thesame man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were thethought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it,and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughtsof whiteness have in common is their object, and this object isdifferent from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though whenknown they are the objects of thoughts.

　　We shall find it convenient only to speak of things existing whenthey are in time, that is to say, when we can point to some time at whichthey exist (not excluding the possibility of their existing at all times).Thus thoughts and feelings, minds and physical objects exist. Butuniversals do not exist in this sense; we shall say that they subsistor have being, where 'being' is opposed to 'existence' as beingtimeless. The world of universals, therefore, may also be described as theworld of being. The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact,delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysicalsystems, and all who love perfection more than life. The world ofexistence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clearplan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all thedata of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do eithergood or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of lifeand the world. According to our temperaments, we shall prefer thecontemplation of the one or of the other. The one we do not prefer willprobably seem to us a pale shadow of the one we prefer, and hardly worthyto be regarded as in any sense real. But the truth is that both have thesame claim on our impartial attention, both are real, and both areimportant to the metaphysician. Indeed no sooner have we distinguished thetwo worlds than it becomes necessary to consider their relations.

　　But first of all we must examine our knowledge of universals. Thisconsideration will occupy us in the following chapter, where we shall findthat it solves the problem of a priori knowledge, from which wewere first led to consider universals.