IMPORT OF PROPOSITIONS. 103 



Diamond and Combustible first received their meaning ; and 

 could not have been discovered by the most ingenious and 

 refined analysis of the signification of those words. It was 

 found out by a very different process, namely, by exerting the 

 senses, and learning from them, that the attribute of com 

 bustibility existed in the diamonds upon which the experi 

 ment was tried ; the number or character of the experiments 

 being such, that what was true of those individuals might be 

 concluded to be true of all substances &quot; called by the name/ 

 that is, of all substances possessing the attributes which the 

 name connotes. The assertion, therefore, when analysed, is, 

 that wherever we find certain attributes, there will be found a 

 certain other attribute : which is not a question of the signifi 

 cation of names, but of laws of nature ; the order existing 

 among phenomena. 



3. Although Hobbes theory of Predication has not, in 

 the terms in which he stated it, met with a very favourable 

 reception from subsequent thinkers, a theory virtually iden 

 tical with it, and not by any means so perspicuously expressed, 

 may almost be said to have taken the rank of an established 

 opinion. The most generally received notion of Predication 

 decidedly is that it consists in referring something to a class, 

 i.e., either placing an individual under a class, or placing one 

 class under another class. Thus, the proposition, Man is 

 mortal, asserts, according to this view of it, that the class 

 man is included in the class mortal. &quot; Plato is a philosopher,&quot; 

 asserts that the individual Plato is one of those who compose 

 the class philosopher. If the proposition is negative, then 

 instead of placing something in a class, it is said to exclude 

 something from a class. Thus, if the following be the propo 

 sition, The elephant is not carnivorous; what is asserted 

 (according to this theory) is, that the elephant is excluded, 

 from the class carnivorous, or is not numbered among the 

 things comprising that class. There is no real difference, 

 except in language, between this theory of Predication and 

 the theory of Hobbes. For a class is absolutely nothing but 

 an indefinite number of individuals denoted by a general 



