And we get in St. Thomas, when he is too much dominated by the abstractive trend, a most interesting, because logically necessitated and quite unconscious, collision with certain sayings of Our Lord.
This reflective consciousness cannot go back of the soul itself, where it finds the abstractive idea passively received from concrete being.
We have no intuitive insight into their natures; all our knowledge here is abstractive and discursive.
Here it is the reasoning, argumentative, abstractive side of human nature that begins to come into play.
An abstractive conception, as that of the human species, is one formed from the consideration of men actually existing, in whom the species is actually individualized.
It is not, however, a mere abstract conception, but an abstractive conception.
To-day it is no longer difficult to understand how the divine ideas were born, how they were created in succession by the abstractive faculty of man.
As an instinctive he is below the level; as an abstractive he attains it; as a specialist he rises above it.
Each event-particle is a group of equal abstractive sets and each abstractive set towards its small-end is composed of smaller and smaller finite events.
Accordingly an event-particle as thus defined is an abstractive element, namely it is the group of those abstractive sets which are each equal to some given abstractive set.
If an abstractive set p covers an abstractive set q, then any abstractive set belonging to the abstractive element of which p is a member will cover any abstractive set belonging to the element of which q is a member.
Let σ be the name of any condition which some abstractive sets fulfil.
It is more convenient for technical purposes to look on a moment as being the class of all abstractivesets of durations with the same convergence.
It will be remembered that an abstractive element is a certain group of abstractive sets, and that each abstractive set is a set of events.
You will remember that in my last lecture I defined the concept of an abstractive set of durations.
We may term these connexions of the component durations the 'extrinsic' properties of a moment; the 'intrinsic' properties of the moment are the properties of nature arrived at as a limit as we proceed along any one of its abstractive sets.
What we really perceive with all our efforts after exactness are small events far enough down someabstractive set belonging to the volume as an abstractive element.
Also if P be any moment, either every abstractive element belonging to a given punct lies in P, or no abstractive element of that punct lies in P.
The possibility of this equality of abstractive sets arises from the fact that both sets, p and q, are infinite series towards their small ends.
We can arbitrarily exclude any set of events at the big end of an abstractive set without the loss of any important property to the set as thus modified.
Accordingly an event-particle could cover no other abstractive element.
For then any other abstractive set which an abstractive set of an event-particle covered, would be equal to it, and would therefore be a member of the same event-particle.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "abstractive" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
