Kinds, and sameness of kind--what colossally useful DENKMITTEL for
finding our way among the many! The manyness might conceivably have
been absolute. Experiences might have all been singulars, no one of
them occurring twice. In such a world logic would have had no
application; for kind and sameness of kind are logic's only
instruments. Once we know that whatever is of a kind is also of that
kind's kind, we can travel through the universe as if with seven-
league boots. Brutes surely never use these abstractions, and
civilized men use them in most various amounts.
Causal influence, again! This, if anything, seems to have been an
antediluvian conception; for we find primitive men thinking that
almost everything is significant and can exert influence of some
sort. The search for the more definite influences seems to have
started in the question: "Who, or what, is to blame?"--for any
illness, namely, or disaster, or untoward thing. From this centre
the search for causal influences has spread. Hume and 'Science'
together have tried to eliminate the whole notion of influence,
substituting the entirely different DENKMITTEL of 'law.' But law is
a comparatively recent invention, and influence reigns supreme in
the older realm of common sense.
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