Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: or imperfect concepts preparatory to perfect concepts. When, for example, the position has been attained that morality is not a phenomenon of egoism and that it has value in itself, or one has become certain that Hannibal was ignorant of the disaster that befell his brother Hasdrubal on the Metaurus, it is impossible to continue believing that morality is egoism, or that Hannibal has been informed of the arrival of Hasdrubal and had voluntarily allowed him to be surprised by the two Consuls. But with conceptual fictions similar to those in the example the case is otherwise. Even when we are persuaded that the triangle and free motion correspond to nothing real, and that the rose, the cat, and the house have nothing precise and universal in them, we must yet continue to make use of the fictions of triangles, of free motion ; of houses, cats, and roses. We can criticise them, and we cannot renounce them ; therefore, it is not true that they are, at least altogether and in every sense, errors. This indispensability of conceptual fictions to the life of the spirit, finds acknowledgment in a more temperate form of the doctrine which considers them as erroneous concepts; that is, in the thesis that they are erroneous, but at the same time preparatory to, and almost a first step towards, the formation of true and proper concepts.The spirit does not issue all at once from representations and attain to the universal ; it issues from them little by little, and prior to the rigorous universal, it constructs others less rigorous, which have the advantage of replacing the infinite representations with their infinite shades, through which reality presents itself in aesthetic contemplation. Conceptual fictions, then, would be sketches of concepts, and therefore, like all sketches, capable... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.