12

OverviewVersionsHelp

Facsimile

Transcription

Status: Complete

question, why opium puts people to sleep, by saying that it is because it has a dormitive virtue. This an answer that: no death carries vagueness to its last extreme. Yet, invented as the story was to show how little meaning there might be in any abstraction, nevertheless the physician's answer does contain a truth that modern philosophy has generally denied: it does assert that there really is in opium something which explains its always putting people to sleep. This has, I say, been denied by modern philosophers generally. Not, of course, explicitly; but when they say that the different events of people going to sleep after taking opium have really nothing in common, but only that the mind classes them together; - and this is what they virtually do say in denying the reality of generals; - they do implicitly deny that there is any true explanation of opium's generally putting people to sleep.

Look through the modern logical treatises, and you will find

Notes and Questions

Nobody has written a note for this page yet

Please sign in to write a note for this page