all try to give a fuller
idea of during the remainder of this present hour.

In recent controversies some participants have shown resentment
at being classed as intellectualists. I mean to use the word
disparagingly, but shall be sorry if it works offence. Intellectualism
has its source in the faculty which gives us our chief superiority to
the brutes, our power, namely, of translating the crude flux of our
merely feeling-experience into a conceptual order. An immediate
experience, as yet unnamed or classed, is a mere _that_ that we
undergo, a thing that asks, '_What_ am I?' When we name and class it,
we say for the first time what it is, and all these whats are abstract
names or concepts. Each concept means a particular _kind_ of thing,
and as things seem once for all to have been created in kinds, a far
more efficient handling of a given bit of experience begins as soon as
we have classed the various parts of it. Once classed, a thing can be
treated by the law of its class, and the advantages are endless. Both
theoretically and practically this power of framing abstract concepts
is one of the sublimest of our human prerogatives. We come back
into the concrete from our journey into these abstractions, with an
increase both of vision and of power. It is no wonder that earlier
thinkers, forgetting that concepts are only man-made extracts from the
temporal flux, should have ended by treating them as a superior type
of being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed in
nature to the turbid, restless lower world. The latter then appears as
but their corruption and falsification.

Intellectualism in the vicious sense began when Socrates and Plato
taught that what a thing really is, is told us by its _definition_.
Ever since Socrates we have been taught that reality consists of
essences, not of appearances, and that the essences of things are
known whenever we know their definitions. So first we identify
the thing with a concept and then we identify the concept with a
definition, and only then, inasmuch as the thing _is_ whatever the
definition expresses, are we sure of apprehending the real essence of
it or the full truth about it.

So far no harm is done. The misuse of concepts begins with the habit
of employing them privatively as well as positively, using them not
merely to assign properties to things, but to deny the very properties
with which the things sensibly present themselves. Logic can extract
all