Concepts, he writes, are precious in themselves … apart from their original use, and confer new dignity upon our life …so long as their original function does not get swallowed up in the admiration and lost. That function is of course to enlarge mentally our momentary experiences by adding to them the consequences conceived; but unfortunately, that function is not only too often forgotten by philosophers in their reasonings, but is often converted into its exact opposite, and made a means of diminishing the original experience by denying (implicitly or explicitly) all its features save the one
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