Words are symbols of ideas about reality. How does one derive ideas from reality and how does one classify them? Generating a universal idea or concept involves several steps, a process more fully treated in the study of psychology.

GENERATION OF A CONCEPT
First the external senses—sight, hearing, touch, smell, tast e—operate on an object present before us and produce a percept. The internal senses, primarily the imaginat ion, produce a phantasm or mental image of the individual object perceived, and this phantasm is retained and can be reproduced at will in the absence of the object.

ILLUSTRATION: Percept and phantasm

A percept is like a portrait being painted by the artist while she looks at the model.

A phantasm is like that same portrait possessed and looked at whenever one wishes for years afterward although the person painted is absent or even dead.