DIVISIONS OF CONCEPTS AND TERMS. 67 



hold together in one mental synthesis, in one concept, such a chaotic jumble 

 of not-white &quot;entities as virtue, a dream, time, a soliloquy, New Guinea, 

 the Seven Ages of Man &quot;. l It is not impossible to do so. Let the things be 

 as varied and vague and chaotic to the imagination as you please, the nega 

 tive bond of the absence of a certain attribute, &quot;whiteness,&quot; is a perfectly 

 intelligible bond, and denotes a group of things about which we can think 

 and speak intelligibly. What is to be freely admitted of course is this, that 

 in ordinary thought we very rarely if ever think of such a group : we almost 

 invariably limit the application of such formally negative terms to the universe 

 of discourse indicated by the next highest class of things, the proximate 

 genus: by not-white things we usually mean &quot;not-white coloured things,&quot; 

 by &quot;non-voters&quot; not all things nor even all men with no right to vote, but 

 &quot; all the inhabitants of a certain town or district or country &quot; who have 

 not that right. And so on. But such limitation, though always assumed in 

 ordinary thought, is not necessary for intelligibility. It has been argued that 

 such propositions as &quot;sound is not-white,&quot; &quot;virtue is not-blue,&quot; etc., are 

 meaningless and absurd. It would be more correct, perhaps, to say that 

 they are so obviously true as to be wholly superfluous seeing that sound 

 and virtue are not coloured things at all. They are not ; and therefore it is 

 a fortiori true though needless to say they are neither white nor blue : 

 &quot; As a rule, it is needless to exclude explicitly from a species what does not 

 even belong to some higher genus. But the fact of exclusion remains.&quot; 2 



On another ground, however, we should rightly deny that such purely 

 negative notions and terms as &quot;non-white&quot; are genuine, or deserving of the 

 name of concepts and terms : for this reason, namely, that they have no posi 

 tive intension distinct from that of the positive term, that their only intelligible 

 use and function is in judgment , in predication^ and that the form of negation 

 belongs to the proposition and not to the term. We regard such propositions 

 as &quot; virtue is not-blue &quot; as perfectly identical with &quot; virtue is not blue &quot;. That 

 is to say, the terms are the same ; in our thought it is invariably the copula 

 or form of the proposition, and not the predicate, that is affected by the nega 

 tive. Lotze rightly contends (Logic, 40, 72) that &quot; everything which it is 

 wished to secure by the affirmative predicate non-Q is secured by the intel 

 ligible negation of Q &quot;. But we see no reason to refuse recognition to the 

 form &quot;A is non-Q v . He rejects the latter form and consistently denies the 

 lawfulness of obversion (117) the process of passing from, e.g., &quot;spirit is not 

 matter&quot; to &quot;spirit is not-matter&quot;. He admits, however, the universal 

 validity of the principle of excluded middle (14) : an admission which implies 

 that a predicate (such as blue] can be intelligibly denied, or its corresponding 

 negative (non-blue) intelligently affirmed, even of things that do not belong to 

 the class (coloured things) immediately above those predicates. But if this 

 be so, negative terms used in predication may have an intelligible meaning 

 without being limited to the universe of their next highest genus, or in fact 

 limited at all. 



When we deny an attribute of a subject, the reason of the denial is often 



to be found in the subject itself (97, 98) in the fact that there are in that 



subject other attributes incompatible with the one denied of it. For these 



latter we have often no special name, contenting ourselves with a negative 



1 KEYNES, op. cit., p. 59. *ibid., p. 60. 



5 * 



