Certain characteristics of the subject are clear. To begin with, we do not in this subject deal with particular things or particular properties: we deal formally with what can be said about any thing or any property. We are prepared to say that one and one are two, but not that Socrates and Plato are two.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the distinction between abstract concepts and specific entities.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell highlights the difference between the formal properties we can attribute to abstract concepts and the particular characteristics of individual entities. He is pointing out that while we can make universal statements about quantities, such as one and one being two, we cannot define specific individuals like Socrates and Plato in the same abstract manner. This underscores the importance of understanding both the general and the specific in philosophical discussions, as well as in our perception of reality.
In practice
In a philosophy class discussing the nature of knowledge, this quote can illustrate the difference between abstract principles and specific examples.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them, and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men, than men upon governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad; if it be ill, they will cure it. But if men be bad, let the government be never so good, they will endeavour to warp and spoil it to their turn.
When a man's home is born out of his heart and developed through his labor and perfected through his sense of beauty, it is the very cornerstone of life.
And there we all were, as invisible as you could wish to see.
Cultivated leisure is the aim of man.
I never took hallucinogenic drugs because I never wanted my consciousness expanded one unnecessary iota.
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
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