of suggestion have probably a cerebral basis. The
new percept -- the generic idea -- repeats to a great extent, both in
nature and localization, the excitement constituting the various
original impressions; as the percept reproduces more or less of
these it will be a more or less full and impartial representative of
them. Not all the suggestions of a word or image are equally ripe.
A generic idea or type usually presents to us a very inadequate and
biassed view of the field it means to cover. As we reflect and seek
to correct this inadequacy, the percept changes on our hands. The
very consciousness that other individuals and other qualities fall
under our concept, changes this concept, as a psychological
presence, and alters its distinctness and extent. When I remember,
to use a classical example, that the triangle is not isosceles, nor
scalene, nor rectangular, but each and all of those, I reduce my
percept to the word and its definition, with perhaps a sense of the
general motion of the hand and eye by which we trace a three-cornered
figure.

Since the production of a general idea is thus a matter of subjective
bias, we cannot expect that a type should be the exact average of
the examples from which it is drawn. In a rough way, it is the
average; a fact that in itself is the strongest of arguments against
the independence or priority of the general idea. The beautiful
horse, the beautiful speech, the beautiful face, is always a medium
between the extremes which our experience has offered. It is
enough that a given characteristic should be generally present in
our experience, for it to become an indispensable element of the
ideal. There is nothing in itself beautiful or necessary in the shape
of the human ear, or in the presence of nails on the fingers and toes;
but the ideal of man, which the preposterous conceit of our
judgment makes us set up as divine and eternal, requires these
precise details; without them the human form would be repulsively
ugly.

It often happens that the accidents of experience make us in this
way introduce into the ideal, elements which, if they could be
excluded without disgusting us, would make possible satisfactions
greater than those we can now enjoy. Thus the taste formed by one
school of art may condemn the greater beauties created by another.
In morals we have the same phenomenon. A barbarous ideal of life
requires tasks and dangers incompatible with happiness; a rude and
oppresse