THINGS DENOTED BY NAMES. 51 



ment, conception, and the like ? Probably all these would 

 have been placed by the Aristotelian school in the categories 

 of actio and passio ; and the relation of such of them as are 

 active, to their objects, and of such of them as are passive, to 

 their causes, would rightly be so placed ; but the things 

 themselves, the feelings or states of mind, wrongly. Feelings, 

 or states of consciousness, are assuredly to be counted among 

 realities, but they cannot be reckoned either among substances 

 or attributes. 



2. Before recommencing, under better auspices, the 

 attempt made with such imperfect success by the great founder 

 of the science of logic, we must take notice of an unfortunate 

 ambiguity in all the concrete names which correspond to the 

 most general of all abstract terms, the word Existence. When 

 we have occasion for a name which shall be capable of denoting 

 whatever exists, as contradistinguished from non-entity or 

 Nothing, there is hardly a word applicable to the purpose 

 which is not also, and even more familiarly, taken in a sense 

 in which it denotes only substances. But substances are not 

 all that exists ; attributes, if such things are to be spoken of, 

 must be said to exist ; feelings certainly exist Yet when we 

 speak of an object, or of a thing, we are almost always sup- 

 posed to mean a substance. There seems a kind of contra- 

 diction in using such an expression as that one thing is merely 

 an attribute of another thing. And the announcement of a 

 Classification of Things would, I believe, prepare most readers 

 for an enumeration like those in natural history, beginning 

 with the great divisions of animal, vegetable, and mineral, 

 and subdividing them into classes and orders. If, rejecting 

 the word Thing, we endeavour to find another of a more 

 general import, or at least more exclusively confined to that 

 general import, a word denoting all that exists, and connoting 

 only simple existence ; no word might be presumed fitter for 

 such a purpose than being : originally the present participle 

 of a verb which in one of its meanings is exactly equivalent to 

 the verb exists ; and therefore suitable, even by its grammatical 

 formation, to be the concrete of the abstract existence. But this 



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