Note 12 — GENERALISATION

: Mill's nominalistic tendencies led him to the same conclusion: 'Our general ideas contain nothing but what has been put into them, either by our passive experience, or by our active habits of thought; and the metaphysicians in all ages, who have attempted to construct the laws of the universe by reasoning from our supposed necessities of thought, have always proceeded, and only could proceed, by laboriously finding in their own minds what they themselves had formerly put there, and evolving from their ideas of things what they had first involved in those ideas.'—Logic, Bk. V. c. 3. § 3.