ON VARIOUS POINTS OF THE ONYMATIC SYSTEM. 



447 



examined Aristotle, &c., entertains any doubt about it. Predication, the assertion made 

 in an affirmative proposition, is not identification, far less equation, of subject and predicate, 

 but simply declares the predicate notion to be true of the subject. This predicate has an 

 adjective force, is rather an attribute of the subject — a frequent name in later times — than 

 another and containing superject, and the proposition is very close to the character which in 

 my third paper I have called physical. The predicate is applied in its totality to the 

 individual of the subject class ; and is distributed over as many individuals as the proposition 

 speaks of, one by one, being given whole to each one of them. Thus ' Every man is 

 mortal' says of each man all that it says of every other. No such image ever presented 

 itself to the ancients as a notion which, instead of being applied whole, is itself cut piece- 

 meal and assigned, bit by bit, to the bits of the subject. Such imagination is possible, 

 because it is actual. We have before us (VI. 64.S*) the assertion that our attribute of 

 mortality is divisible: that when we sum up men, we also sum up their mortalities: that 

 Newton has this mortality, Leibnitz that, &c. But none of this is in the old notion of 

 predication ; and my present controversy is with those who arraign Aristotle and his 

 followers at the bar of this principle, and declare that a plea to the jurisdiction must be 

 overruled. 



The Hamiltonians, and many others, read their great exemplar — as I may call Aristotle 

 — in cumular sense, until they have lost' the perception of ns, omnis, quidam, being indivi- 

 duals : so that when a table of forms is presented in which singularity is enforced by the word 

 one, enormous learning declares that it stands alone in history. A plain statement will 

 show that the declarant read history through coloured glass. 



Aristotle (De Interpr. cap. vii.) denies quantity to a predicate : he says that no affirmative 

 could then be true — ovoefila yap Kardipaais aX»j0>/9 ecrrat. And he* instances ttus av9f>ioiros 

 ■jTOLv '(^(pov. Wholly exemplar in his enunciation, quite ignorant that Tra? avOpwrroi meant all 

 man, — the whole extent of the term man, — he said a plain Greek thing in a plain Greek way 

 to Greeks who knew Greek. He said it is false — formally false, apart from the matter — 

 that every man is every living being, meaning that then Socrates would be every living being, 

 so would Plato, &c. When he affirmed a certain quantification to be always false, he meant 

 false in quantity. And he was perfectly right : for there never was man who was more than 

 one living being. The proposition 'Every X is every Y' makes singular terms both of 

 X and Y. 



» There is much interesting discussion in Mr Spalding's 

 Introduction to Logical Science (1857), but one single sen- 

 tence curiously instances the want of power to see the singular 

 which marks the modern logical mind. It will clearly appear 

 that Mr Spalding was a man of extensive reading and acute 

 perception. He says (p. t)3), that the logical some is always 

 indeterminate, some or other, not certain definite objects : " it 

 is always aliqui, never quidam." This is perfectly true ; even 

 the collector Crackanthorpe does not admit quidam. But it 

 should have been " it is always aliquis, never quidam," quidam 

 being singular. 



The only remark on the subject which I know of, published 

 since Hamilton's denial of the existence of the exemplar form. 



Vol. X. Part 1 1. 



is in the third edition (p. 67) of Mr Mansel's edition of Aid- 

 rich (1856). Here oli iras, when a substantive is put on, is 

 translated not all men : another instance of the obliteration of 

 the distinction between every man and all men. 



' I noted in a former paper that the ordinary practice of 

 translating ^wov into animal has led to the representation that 

 Aristotle ranked the immortal gods under animals. I have 

 since found that Francis Patricius, when collecting his proofs 

 that Plato was more orthodox (in the Christian sense) than 

 Aristotle, cites this supposed opinion as one of his proofs. 

 I hope none of the Greek Fathers have been belied in the 

 same way. 



57 



