Reading Schulz this evening, struck by an elementary thought about language. The phrase was this (although it could have been almost any): ".. with old pots and pans stacked on top of one another." When we read such words, we of course understand them at once, unthinkingly. Yet we do so without having to visualise a particular pot, a particular pan. It is though what the mind grasps, in a cursory and impatient way, is simply the idea of these things - without colour, volume, height, or any tangible qualities at all. And it is as though such ideas become 'more real' than tangible and discrete things, which matter only as illustrations or examples of such ideas.
Needless to say, this is hardly an original thought, and after some reflection and digging around, I realised that I was probably dimly inspired by this passage from Hegel:
"Given the name lion, we need neither the actual vision of the animal, nor its image evn: the name alone, if we understand it, is the unimagined simple representation. We think in names."