e external nature of the knowledge obtained by conceptual analysis
is only its least fault. There are others still more serious.

If concepts actually express what is common, general, unspecific, what
should make us feel the need of recasting them when we apply them to a
new object?

Does not their ground, their utility, and their interest exactly consist
in sparing us this labour?

We regard them as elaborated once for all. They are building-material,
ready-hewn blocks, which we have only to bring together. They are atoms,
simple elements--a mathematician would say prime factors--capable of
associating with infinity, but without undergoing any inner modification
in contact with it. They admit linkage; they can be attached externally,
but they leave the aggregate as they went into it.

Juxtaposition and arrangement are the geometrical operations which
typify the work of knowledge in such a case; or else we must fall back
on metaphors from some mental chemistry, such as proportioning and
combination.

In all cases, the method is still that of alignment and blending of
pre-existent concepts.

Now the mere fact of proceeding thus is equivalent to setting up the
concept as a symbol of an abstract class. That being done, explanation
of a thing is no more than showing it in the intersection of several
classes, partaking of each of them in definite proportions: which is
the same as considering it sufficiently expressed by a list of general
frames into which it will go. The unknown is then, on principle, and
in virtue of this theory, referred to the already known; and it thereby
becomes impossible ever to grasp any true novelty or any irreducible
originality.

On principle, once more, we claim to reconstruct nature with pure
symbols; and it thereby becomes impossible ever to reach its concrete
reality, "the invisible and present soul."

This intuitional coinage in fixed standard concepts, this creation of
an easily handled intellectual cash, is no doubt of evident practical
utility. For knowledge in the usual sense of the word is not a
disinterested operation; it consists in finding out what profit we can
draw from an object, how we are to conduct ourselves towards it, what
label we can suitably attach to it, under what already known class
it comes, to what degree it is deserving of this or that title which
determines an attitude we must take up, or a step we must perform. Our
end is to place the object in its approxi