Page "Concept" Paragraph 3

Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued that concepts are " mere abstractions from what is known through intuitive perception, and they have arisen from our arbitrarily thinking away or dropping of some qualities and our retention of others.

" ( Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol.

I, " Sketch of a History of the Ideal and the Real ").

In his On the Will in Nature, " Physiology and Pathology ," Schopenhauer said that a concept is " drawn off from previous images ... by putting off their differences.

This concept is then no longer intuitively perceptible, but is denoted and fixed merely by words.

" Nietzsche, who was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, wrote: " Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal.

No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept ' leaf ' is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions ..."