And by “he” you mean “everyone”?

“He had a constant interest in ideas, which made him an entertaining companion. They meant nothing to him really, since they never had any effect on him; but he treated them as he might have pieces of china in an auction-room, handling them with pleasure in their shape and their glaze, pricing them in his mind; and then, putting them back into their case, thought of them no more.” (Maugham, Of Human Bondage)

If you treat ideas as tools rather than as pieces of china, are they then actually tools (I almost said “do they then become tools” but that’s not what I mean), or do you just end up trying to hammer with a china plate and breaking the plate all over the floor and having to find a broom—a real broom, not an idea-broom—to clean it all up?

In other news on the abstraction front, I don’t know what an opinion is. Plato’s definition never really made sense to me—or at least I assume that’s why I can’t remember a thing he said on the subject—and neither does anyone else’s. It’s hard to teach kids to express their opinions, not to mention back up their opinions with “evidence,” if you don’t know what you’re trying to teach them.