4 6 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. 



Proper Names, on the other hand, are non- significant : a 

 proper name may be defined as a term used conventionally to 

 serve as a mark or sign to indicate an individual person, place, 

 thing, or event, without implying any attribute of the latter. It is, 

 therefore, a mere arbitrary verbal sign, a mere label for the identi 

 fication of an individual object, and not intended to convey any 

 information about that object. From the accidental fact that 

 many individuals have, or may have, the same proper name, we 

 must not therefore infer that it ought to be a general term, for 

 such individuals are not understood to have got the name in virtue 

 of anv attribute they possess in common; on the contrary, every 

 occasion on which such a name is fixed upon an individual the 

 reference is understood to be to that individual alone (cf. infra, 37). 



There are two cases in which proper names are apparently general terms. 

 The first is where a statement is made about the class of persons who happen 

 to agree in this point of having some proper name in common, as &quot; Some 

 Patricks are not Irishmen &quot;. In such examples the name is not really used as 

 a proper name, but as indicating an attribute (the extrinsic, accidental attribute 

 of having the same name) possessed in common by the class referred to. The 

 second case is where the proper name of some notable individual is applied to 

 others who possess the characteristics of that individual in a marked degree, 

 as when we say of a person that he is a Socrates, a Napoleon, an Ignatius. 

 Here, evidently, the name is not used as a proper name, but as signifying cer 

 tain attributes and applying to all individuals who may be found to possess 

 those attributes. 



29. COLLECTIVE AND SUBSTANTIAL TERMS. A Collective 

 Term is the name of a group of similar units, as army, library, 

 nation. The origin of such names is due to the need for some 

 special term to express (a) a number of separate units (b) collected 

 into one whole or group because of some similarity of the units. 

 The object expressed by a non-collective or unitary term such as 

 paper, may be composed of a number of similar elements, but 

 these are not thought of as separate ; and on the other hand if there 

 be no similarity between the members of a group as, for ex 

 ample, a group composed of a man, a boat, the House of Com 

 mons, and a month it is neither needful nor possible to get a 

 special name for the group. 



Collective terms may be either general, as library, or singular 

 as Maynooth College Library, according as they come under one or 

 other of the definitions of such terms given above (28). When 

 singular, they fall for the most part into the class of significant in 

 dividual terms: only a comparatively small number of collective 



