52 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



word, strange as the fact may appear, is still more completely 

 spoiled for the purpose which it seemed expressly made for, 

 than the word Thing. Being is, by custom, exactly synony 

 mous with substance ; except that it is free from a slight taint 

 of a second ambiguity; being applied impartially to matter 

 and to mind, while substance, though originally and in strict 

 ness applicable to both, is apt to suggest in preference the idea 

 of matter Attributes are never called Beings ; nor are feel 

 ings. A Being is that which excites feelings, and which pos 

 sesses attributes. The soul is called a Being; God and angels 

 are called Beings ; but if we were to say, extension, colour, 

 wisdom, virtue, are beings, we should perhaps be suspected of 

 thinking with some of the ancients, that the cardinal virtues 

 are animals; or, at the least, of holding with the Platonic 

 school the doctrine of self-existent Ideas, or with the fol 

 lowers of Epicurus that of Sensible Forms, which detach 

 themselves in every direction from bodies, and by coming in 

 contact with our organs, cause our perceptions. We should 

 be supposed, in short, to believe that Attributes are Substances. 

 In consequence of this perversion of the word Being, phi 

 losophers looking about for something to supply its place, laid 

 their hands upon the word Entity, a piece of barbarous Latin, 

 invented by the schoolmen to be used as an abstract name, in 

 which class its grammatical form would seem to place it ; but 

 being seized by logicians in distress to stop a leak in their 

 terminology, it has ever since been used as a concrete name. 

 The kindred word essence, born at the same time and of the 

 same parents, scarcely underwent a more complete transforma 

 tion when,, from being the abstract of the verb to be, it came 

 to denote something sufficiently concrete to be enclosed in a 

 glass bottle. The word Entity, since it settled down into a 

 concrete name, has retained its universality of signification 

 somewhat less impaired than any of the names before men 

 tioned. Yet the same gradual decay to which, after a certain 

 age, all the language of psychology seems liable, has been at 

 work even here. If you call virtue an entity, you are indeed 

 somewhat less strongly suspected of believing it to be a sub 

 stance than if you called it a being ; but you are by no means 



