106 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



place the individual in the class because the proposition is 

 true; the proposition is not true because the object is placed 

 in the class. 



It will appear hereafter, in treating of reasoning, how 

 much the theory of that intellectual process has been vitiated 

 by the influence of these erroneous notions, and by the habit 

 which they exemplify of assimilating all the operations of the 

 human understanding which have truth for their object, to pro 

 cesses of mere classification and naming. Unfortunately, the 

 minds which have been entangled in this net are precisely those 

 which have escaped the other cardinal error commented upon 

 in the beginning of the present chapter. Since the revolution 

 which dislodged Aristotle from the schools, logicians may 

 almost be divided into those who have looked upon reasoning 

 as essentially an affair of Ideas, and those who have looked 

 upon it as essentially an affair of Names. 



Although, however, Hobbes theory of Predication, accord 

 ing to the well-known remark of Leibnitz, and the avowal of 

 Hobbes himself,* renders truth and falsity completely arbi 

 trary, with no standard but the will of men, it must not be 

 concluded that either Hobbes, or any of the other thinkers 

 who have in the main agreed with him, did in fact consider the 

 distinction between truth and error as less real, or attached less 

 importance to it, than other people. To suppose that they did 

 so would argue total unacquaintance with their other specula 

 tions. But this shows how little hold their doctrine possessed 

 over their own minds. No person, at bottom, ever imagined 

 that there was nothing more in truth than propriety of expres 

 sion; than using language in conformity to a previous conven 

 tion. When the inquiry was brought down from generals to a 

 particular case, it has always been acknowledged that there is a 

 distinction between verbal and real questions ; that some false 

 propositions are uttered from ignorance of the meaning of 



* &quot;From hence also this may be deduced, that the first truths were arbi 

 trarily made by those that first of all imposed names upon things, or received 

 them from the imposition of others. For it is true (for example) that man is a 

 living creature, but it is for this reason, that it pleased men to impose both these 

 names on the same thing.&quot; Computation or Logic, ch. iii. sect. 8. 



