CHAPTER II. 

 THE PREDICABLES. 



43. WHAT ARE THE PREDICABLES? ARISTOTLE S FOUR 

 FOLD SCHEME. From the preceding chapter it will be gathered 

 that intension and extension are the two most important 

 characteristics of our ideas of things. It will be remembered 

 also that it is by comparing these concepts with one another in 

 the mental act of judgment that we obtain and formulate con 

 sciously our knowledge of whatever we know. It is possible, 

 therefore, to compare any two terms the subject and predicate 

 of any proposition with each other both as to their intension 

 and as to their extension. The results of such comparison will 

 give us an enumeration of all the possible kinds of predication, or 

 ways of predicating one concept or term about another. These 

 relations are called Praedicabilia, tcarrjyopripaTa, from praedicare, 

 Karrjyopeiv, to predicate or assert. The Predicables, therefore, 

 may be defined as a classification of the relations of predicate to 

 subject in a logical judgment or proposition. They are called by 

 the Scholastics quinque modi praedicandi the five ways of predi 

 cating and also quinque voces &quot;the five words&quot; because each 

 of the five relations has got a special name of its own ; and, being 

 characteristically logical entities, they have always held an im 

 portant place in the scholastic treatment of logic. That they are 

 &quot;logical entities,&quot; entia rationis, will be evident when we reflect 

 that they are not names given to the objects of our direct con 

 cepts, but to relations which the mind, by reflecting on its direct 

 concepts and comparing these with one another, itself creates or 

 establishes between the latter. In other words, they are the 

 names of secundae intentiones mentis not of primae intentiones 

 mentis (I9). 1 



Before explaining the traditional fivefold scheme, first elaborated by 

 Porphyry 2 in his Isagoge, or Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle^ 



1 Cf. CLARKE, Logic, pp. 165 sqq. 



2 A Neo-Platonic philosopher who flourished A.D. 233-304. 



72 



