DIVISIONS OF CONCEPTS AND TERMS. 47 



terms are proper names ; and these are geographical, as The 

 Pyrenees, The Archipelago. 



Of course it is only an exceedingly small number of all actu 

 ally existing groups or collections of things that have got special 

 collective names ; and if, in the absence of such a collective name, 

 we want to make a statement about some such group as a whole, 

 we must have recourse to the word &quot;all&quot; in the sense of &quot;all 

 together&quot;. For example, &quot;All the angles of a triangle are equal 

 to two right angles,&quot; &quot;All these books will fill the shelf&quot;: here 

 we have the collective use^of the ordinary non-collective or unit 

 ary general term ; while we have the distributive use in the state 

 ments: &quot;All the angles of a triangle are less than two right 

 angles,&quot; &quot;All these books could be read in a week &quot;. Sometimes 

 a collective term is used distributively, as in the example : &quot; The 

 meeting dispersed &quot;. Oftentimes it is not easy to decide whether 

 the statement is intended to be made of the whole of a group or 

 of the individual units; but the context usually enables us to 

 decide: &quot;The people filled the hall&quot;; &quot;The people were ex 

 cited &quot;. Arguing or assuming that what is true of many things 

 distributively is true of them collectively, or vice versa, is the 

 fallacy known as the &quot; sensus compositus&quot; or &quot; sensus divisus&quot;- 

 &quot; composition&quot; or &quot;division&quot;. 



The names of materials such as gold, wood, water, air, salt, 

 have been called &quot;substantial terms&quot;. We may ask, are such 

 terms general or singular, and do we usually employ them col 

 lectively or distributively ? 1 When they are used as predicates 

 which is not often &quot;This is gold ; that is salt,&quot; etc. their use is 

 evidently distributive : they refer not to the one single collective 

 heap of all of that substance (gold or salt) in existence, but to 

 particular portions of it. When we employ them as subjects, the 

 same is generally true : we rarely if ever have in mind the one 

 single collection of all the existing material in question, but rather 

 some or any portion of it: &quot;Some water is unfit for drinking&quot;; 

 &quot;Water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen&quot; (i.e. any and 

 every particle or portion of water); &quot;Oil is lighter than water&quot; 

 (i.e. any definite quantity or volume of oil, compared with an 

 equal volume of water). The terms are here general and distri 

 butive, referring to the portions as units. Moreover we can speak 

 of different kinds of water, etc. which would show that such 



l Cf. WELTON, Logic, L, p. 51 (2nd edit.); VENN, Empirical Logic, pp. 170, 

 171 ; KEYNES, Formal Logic, p. 12 (4th edit.). 



