46 NAMES AND PKOPOSITIONS. 



superficially conducted, would have shown the enumeration to be both re- 

 dundant and defective. Some objects are omitted, and others repeated 

 several times imder different heads. It is like a division of animals into 

 men, quadrupeds, horses, asses, and ponies. That, for instance, could not 

 be a very comprehensive view of the nature of Relation which could ex- 

 clude action, passivity, and local situation from that category. The same 

 observation applies to the categories Quando (or position in time), and Ubi 

 (or position in space); while the distinction between the latter and Situs 

 is merely verbal. The incongruity of erecting into a sumrman genus the 

 class which forms the tenth category is manifest. On the other hand, the 

 enumeration takes no notice of any thing besides substances and attributes. 

 In what category are we to place sensations, or any other feelings and 

 states of mind ; as hope, joy, fear ; sound, smell, taste ; pain, pleasure ; 

 thought, judgment, 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. Feel- 

 ings, or states of consciousness, are assuredly to be accounted among reali- 

 ties, but they can not be reckoned either among substances or attributes.* 



§ 2. Before recommencing, under better auspices, the attempt made with 

 such imperfect success by the early logicians, we must take notice of an 

 unfortunate ambiguity in all the concrete names which correspond to the 

 most general of all abstract terras, 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 



* On the pi'eceding passage Professor Bain remarks (Logic, i., 265) : " T!ie Categories do not 

 seem to have been intended as a classification of Namable Tilings, in the sense of ' an enu- 

 meration of all kinds of Things which are capable of being made predicates, or of having any 

 thing predicated of them.' They seem to have been rather intended as a generalization 

 of predicates ; an analysis of the final import of predication. Viewed in this light, they 

 are not open to the objections offered by Mr. Mill. The proper question to ask is not — In 

 what Category are we to place sensations or other feelings or states of mind? but. Under 

 what Categories can we predicate regarding states of mind? Take, for example, Hope. 

 When we say that it is a state of mind, we predicate Substance : we may also describe how 

 great it is (Quantity), what is the quality of it, pleasurable or painful (Quality), what it has 

 reference to (Relation). Aristotle seems to have framed the Categories on the plan — Here is 

 an individual ; what is the final analysis of all that we can predicate about him ?" 



This is doubtless a true statement of the leading idea in the classification. The Categor}' 

 Ovaia was certainly understood by Aristotle to be a general name for all possible answers to 

 the question Quid sit ? when asked respecting a concrete individual ; as the other Categories 

 are names comprehending all possible answers to the questions Quantum sit ? Quale sit ? etc. 

 In Aristotle's conception, therefore, the Categories may not have been a classification of 

 Things ; but they were soon converted into one by his Scholastic followers, who certainly re- 

 garded and treated them as a classification of Things, and carried them out as such, dividing 

 down the Category Substance as a naturalist might do, into the different classes of physical 

 or metaphysical objects as distinguished from attributes, and the other Categories into the 

 principal varieties of quantitj^, quality, relation, etc. It is, therefore, a just subject of com- 

 plaint against them, that they had no Category of Feeling. Feeling is assuredly predicable as 

 a summum genus, of every particular kind of feeling, for instance, as in I\Ir. Bain's example, of 

 Hope : but it can not be brought within any of the Categories as interpreted either by Aristo- 

 tle or by his followers. 



