IMPORT OF PROPOSITIONS. 107 



words, but that in others the source of the error is a misappre- 

 hension of things ; that a person who has not the use of lan- 

 guage at all may form propositions mentally, and that they 

 may be untrue, that is, he may believe as matters of fact what 

 are not really so. This last admission cannot be made in 

 stronger terms than it is by Hobbes himself;* though he will 

 not allow such erroneous belief to be called falsity, but only 

 error. And he has himself laid down, in other places, doctrines 

 in which the true theory of predication is by implication con- 

 tained. He distinctly says that general names are given to 

 things on account of their attributes, and that abstract names 

 are the names of those attributes. " Abstract is that which in 

 any subject denotes the cause of the concrete name. . . . 

 And these causes of names are the same with the causes of our 

 conceptions, namely, some power of action, or affection, of the 

 thing conceived, which some call the manner by which anything 

 works upon our senses, but by most men they are called acci- 

 dents."^ It is strange that having gone so far, he should not 

 have gone one step farther, and seen that what he calls the 

 cause of the concrete name, is in reality the meaning of it ; 

 and that when we predicate of any subject a name which is 

 given because of an attribute (or, as he calls it, an accident), 

 our object is not to affirm the name, but, by means of the 

 name, to affirm the attribute. 



4. Let the predicate be, as we have said, a connotative 

 term ; and to take the simplest case first, let the subject be a 

 proper name : " The summit of Chimborazo is white." The 



" Men are subject to err not only in affirming and denying, but also in 

 perception, and in silent cogitation. . . Tacit errors, or the errors of sense and 

 cogitation, are made by passing from one imagination to the imagination of 

 another different thing ; or by feigning that to be past, or future, which never 

 was, nor ever shall be ; as when by seeing the image of the sun in water, we 

 imagine the sun itself to be there ; or by seeing swords, that there has been, 

 or shall be, fighting, because it uses to be so for the most part ; or when from 

 promises we feign the mind of the promiser to be such and such ; or, lastly, 

 when from any sign we vainly imagine something to be signified which is not. 

 And errors of this sort are common to all things that have sense." Computa- 

 tion or Logic, ch. v. sect. 1. 



t Ch. iii. sect. 3. 



