202 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. 



(&) If an indesignate proposition be in materia contingent!, i.e. 

 if the predicate be merely an accidens of the subject, the proposi 

 tion must be interpreted as particular. 



The propositions &quot;Parents love their children,&quot; &quot;Virtuous 

 people are happy,&quot; &quot;Dogs are faithful creatures,&quot; &quot; Oranges do 

 not grow in Ireland,&quot; &quot; Cretans are liars,&quot; &quot; Women are talkative,&quot; 

 &quot;Seaside resorts are agreeable,&quot; may be taken as examples of 

 indesignates which, though &quot; morally &quot; universal, must be re 

 garded in logic as particular propositions. 



97. AFFIRMATION AND NEGATION. Propositions have been 

 divided on the basis of Quality into Affirmative and Negative. 

 This distinction is fundamental ; although some philosophers have 

 attempted to reduce negation to affirmation. It is also an ex 

 haustive division of predication ; although Kant endeavoured 

 to find place for a third type of predication, which he claimed to 

 be distinct from both the affirmative and the negative, namely, 

 the affirmative predication of a negative term or notion, giving rise 

 to what he called the Limitative or Infinite judgment, the expres 

 sion of which has been called a Propositio Infinita, &quot; S is not-P 

 (77). But this is not really a distinct type of predication. As far 

 as form is concerned, the propositions &quot; 5 is not P&quot; and &quot; S is 

 not-P&quot; are really equivalent ; while, in its meaning, the proposition 

 &quot;S is not-P&quot; is really a negative on the assumption that P is 

 a positive term. We know that &quot;5 IS not-P&quot; i.e. that it is 

 included in the denotation, or includes the connotation, of &quot;not- 

 /&quot; only by knowing already that &quot;S IS NOT P&quot; i.e. that S is 

 excluded from the denotation, or excludes the (whole collective) 

 connotation of P. So that whenever we thus affirmatively predi 

 cate a negative term, we do so only by having first negatively 

 predicated the corresponding positive term. The form of negation 

 belongs naturally to the copula and not to the predicate even 

 though we artificially transfer it to the latter (59). Thus we 

 see that we cannot, by means of negative predicates, get rid of 

 negative predication, or reduce it to affirmative. 



It may conveniently be noted here, that in the affirmative 

 proposition, each and every single constituent element of the con 

 notation of the predicate is affirmed of the subject. The truth of 

 the proposition &quot; Man is an animal,&quot; demands that he be a sub 

 stance, corporeal, organic, living : that each of these distributive^ 

 and all collectively, be affirmable of him. We have, so to speak, 

 an implicit intensive distribution of the predicate. Now take 



