Never Never
How can my fantasy form something that I have never sensed?
Never seen, never tasted, never smelled, never heard. Is it possible for the mind using the ability – fantasy- to form something totally new, something that is not a very complex combination of all known things so far.
How? The mind perceives through the senses a particular, an entity. From that particular it makes abstractions, generalizations, and when these abstractions are seen to be the same as those found in other particular entities, it becomes a universal, or genus. An example is when a child figures out that the coffee table that he used to help him learn to stand and walk has the same generality as the table he eats his food from, or the table in his room where he colors his books with crayons.
Our imaginations take abstractions and recombine two or more of them in ways that fit the universal, but are different from any particular the senses have perceived. One abstraction of a table is that it has a flat surface on which we place things. The first tables may have been large boulders with flat sides, or the inside curve of a solid piece of tree trunk. Whatever it was, someone knew it would be better if it was lifted up off the ground, so he put legs on it.
Edison knew that electricity that flowed through a wire or something similar would glow and burn. He wanted it to glow for a long time. His powers of abstraction eventually led him to know he had to remove the oxygen, so he put the filament in a vacuum bulb. But then it took him 1000 attempts to find the right filament. All the time he was abstracting information from his failures, until finally he abstracted the right knowledge to find the right filament.
Man’s mind abstracts from the particular, recombines two or more abstractions, and creates a new particular.
Abstracted from many readings of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
Brick & Lace – Never Never
