Slaves to the particular
We begin with what seems a paradox. The world of experience of any
man is composed of a tremendous array of discriminably different
objects, events, people, impressions. There are estimated to be more
that 7 million discriminable colors alone ... [and even subtle
differences] we are capable of seeing, for human beings have an
exquisite capacity for making distinctions. But were we to utilize
fully our capacity for registering the differences in things and to
respond to each event encountered as unique, we would soon be
overwhelmed by the complexity of our environment... [It] would make
us slaves to the particular... [The resolution to this paradox] is
achieved by man's capacity to categorize. To categorize is to render
discriminably different things equivalent, to group the objects and
events and people around us into classes and to respond to them in
terms of their class membership.
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