THE PREDICABLES. 75 



in its thought, various aspects of that single reality, and sets up 

 between these aspects the relations we are discussing in the 

 present chapter. 1 



Lest any ambiguity should arise from our use of the traditional philo 

 sophical terms, essence* and nature* we may state here that by essence we 

 mean simply what we regard as the fundamental constituent of the thing : 

 the attributes we would assign to explain the thing if asked what the thing is : 

 what the Scholastics forcibly if not very elegantly entitled the quidditas or TV hat- 

 ness of the thing : the attributes whose presence guides and determines us in fix 

 ing the connotation of the name we give to that class of things, and the absence 

 of all or any of which from an individual instance would prevent us from putting 

 it into that class or giving it that name : the attributes we regard as directly 

 implied by that name. In substituting the modern logical word &quot; connota 

 tion&quot; or &quot;conventional intension &quot; for the word &quot;essence&quot; 4 in this whole 

 context regarding predication and definition we are in no way committing 

 ourselves to the nominalistic view that these processes deal merely with the 

 use of language and not with the nature of things. 6 For we have already 

 seen that the fixing of connotation must always be checked and guided by 

 constant objective reference to the nature of the things named. And further 

 more, the Scholastics distinguished clearly between the individual essence 

 the essentia atoma 6 and the specific or generic essence the essentia specifica 

 or generica; the former being the sum-total of reality in the individual 

 thing, the sum of all the attributes, common and proper, possessed by the 

 individual, which would constitute the objective intension or comprehension of 

 the individual term; the latter being merely the sum or synthesis of the 

 attributes which the individual possesses in common with other individuals 

 belonging to the same (lowest) class or kind (species) and possessing the same 

 class name. The latter essence alone they regarded as the proper object of 



1 Cf. JOSEPH, op. cit., pp. 68, 69. 



a C/~. CLARKE, Logic, pp. ijosqq. ; MERCIER, Logique, pp. 100 sqq. 



3 The nature is simply the essence considered as the root-principle of all the 

 activities and characteristics by which the thing reveals itself to us. 



4 Cf. VENN, Empirical Logic, p. 271. 

 6 See below, 46. 



6 Also called substantia prima vel individua the first essence or substance 

 the underlying subject of all predicates in the mental or logical order, and of all attri 

 butes in the real or ontological order (45). We must never lose sight of the fact 

 that it is upon the validity of the relation between the universal concept and the 

 individual reality, as expressed in the singular judgment, that the validity of the 

 whole superstructure of our knowledge rests (4-6). Yet, of the individual as such we 

 can have no adequate intellectual concept properly speaking ; for all concepts are 

 abstract and universal at least potentially or theoretically universal. Now, the 

 predicables are properly a classification of the possible relations of universal concepts 

 to one another. Hence when the doctrine of the predicables is applied to judgments 

 with singular subjects, it applies to these latter only in so far as we succeed in form 

 ing intellectual concepts of these singulars. Mr. Joseph contends (op. cit., pp. 93-96) 

 that Porphyry abandoned Aristotle s point of view by conceiving the predicables as 

 relations of universal predicates to singular subjects ; and that the change has led 

 to much confusion. 



