RATIOCINATION, OR SYLLOGISM. 195 



have not been sparing in their contempt for the scholastic 

 dogma that genera and species are a peculiar kind of sub- 

 stances, which general substances being the only permanent 

 things, while the individual substances comprehended under 

 them are in a perpetual flux, knowledge, which necessarily 

 imports stability, can only have relation to those general sub- 

 stances or universals, and not to the facts or particulars in- 

 cluded under them. Yet, though nominally rejected, this 

 very doctrine, whether disguised under the Abstract Ideas of 

 Locke (whose speculations, however, it has less vitiated than 

 those of perhaps any other writer who has been infected with 

 it), under the ultra-nominalism of Hobbes and Condillac, or 

 the ontology of the later Kantians, has never ceased to poison 

 philosophy. Once accustomed to consider scientific investiga- 

 tion as essentially consisting in the study of universals, men 

 did not drop this habit of thought when they ceased to regard 

 universals as possessing an independent existence : and even 

 those who went the length of considering them as mere names, 

 could not free themselves from the notion that the investiga- 

 tion of truth consisted entirely or partly in some kind of con- 

 juration or juggle with those names. When a philosopher 

 adopted fully the Nominalist view of the signification of 

 general language, retaining along with it the dictum de omni 

 as the foundation of all reasoning, two such premises fairly 

 put together were likely, if he was a consistent thinker, to 

 land him in rather startling conclusions. Accordingly it has 

 been seriously held, by writers of deserved celebrity, that the 

 process of arriving at new truths by reasoning consists in the 

 mere substitution of one set of arbitrary signs for another ; 

 a doctrine which they suppose to derive irresistible confirma- 

 tion from the example of algebra. If there were any process 

 in sorcery or necromancy more preternatural than this, I 

 should be much surprised. The culminating point of this 

 philosophy is the noted aphorism of Condillac, that a science 

 is nothing, or scarcely anything, but une langue bien faite ; 

 in other words, that the one sufficient rule for discovering the 

 nature and properties of objects is to name them properly : as 

 if the reverse were not the truth, that it is impossible to name 



132 



