He may not know them at all, he may know them partially, he
may know them through and through. Let us suppose him ignorant of them but
determined to learn. His progress, both in the thought and in the
language, will be from the general to the specific. His acquaintance with
the idea in the large he will gradually extend to an acquaintance with it
in detail, and his command of the broad term for it he will little by
little supplement with definite terms for its phases. An illustration will
make this clear.
We are aware that the world is made up of various classes and conditions
of men. How did we learn this? Let us go back to the time when our minds
were a blank, when we were babes and sucklings, when we had not perceived
that men exist, much less that mankind is infinitely complex. A baby comes
slowly to understand that all objects in the universe are divisible into
two classes, human and non-human, and that a member of the former may be
separated from the others and regarded as an individual. It has reached
the initial stage of its knowledge on the subject; it has the basic idea,
that of the individual human being. As soon as it can speak, it acquires a
designating term--not of course the sophisticated _human being_, but
the simpler _man_.
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