NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



by participation in the nature of a certain general substance, 

 called gold in general, which substance, together with all the 

 properties that belonged to it, inhered in every individual piece 

 of gold.* As they did not consider these universal substances 

 to be attached to all general names, but only to some, they 

 thought that an object borrowed only a part of its properties 

 from an universal substance, and that the rest belonged to it 

 individually : the former they called its essence, and the latter 

 its accidents. The scholastic doctrine of essences long survived 

 the theory on which it rested, that of the existence of real 

 entities corresponding to general terms ; and it was reserved for 

 Locke at the end of the seventeenth century, to convince phi 

 losophers that the supposed essences of classes were merely the 

 signification of their names ; nor, among the signal services 

 which his writings rendered to philosophy, was there one more 

 needful or more valuable. 



Now, as the most familiar of the general names by which 

 an object is designated usually connotes not one only, but 

 several attributes of the object, each of which attributes sepa 

 rately forms also the bond of union of some class, and the 

 meaning of some general name ; we may predicate of a name 

 which connotes a variety of attributes, another name which 

 connotes only one of these attributes, or some smaller number 

 of them than all. In such cases, the universal affirmative pro 

 position will be true ; since whatever possesses the whole of 

 any set of attributes, must possess any part of that same set. 

 A proposition of this sort, however, conveys no information 

 to any one who previously understood the whole meaning of 

 the terms. The propositions, Every man is a corporeal being, 

 Every man is a living creature, Every man is rational, convey 

 no knowledge to any one who was already aware of the entire 

 meaning of the word man, for the meaning of the word 



* The doctrines which prevented the real meaning of Essences from being 

 understood, had not assumed so settled a shape in the time of Aristotle and 

 his immediate followers, as was afterwards given to them by the Realists 

 of the middle ages. Aristotle himself (in his Treatise on the Categories) ex 

 pressly denies that the dtvnpai ovffiat, or Substantial Secundse, inhere in a 

 subject. They are only, he says, predicated of it. 



