In co-operation with an intelligent joiner
I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that
you gave me. Chairs just as much as individual organisms, just as much
as mineral and rock specimens, are unique things--if you know them well
enough you will find an individual difference even in a set of
machine-made chairs--and it is only because we do not possess minds of
unlimited capacity, because our brain has only a limited number of
pigeon-holes for our correspondence with an unlimited universe of
objective uniques, that we have to delude ourselves into the belief that
there is a chairishness in this species common to and distinctive of all
chairs.
Classification and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of
objective realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon
things...
Greek thought impresses me as being over much obsessed by an objective
treatment of certain necessary preliminary conditions of human
thought--number and definition and class and abstract form! But these
things,--number, definition, class and abstract form,--I hold, are
merely unavoidable conditions of mental activity--regrettable conditions
rather than essential facts.
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