IMPORT OF TROPOSITIONS. 75 - 



ulations. What has been done for the advancement of Lo<?ic since these 

 doctrines came into vogue, has been done not by professed logicians, but 

 by discoverers in the other sciences; in whose methods of investigation 

 many principles of logic, not previously thought of, have successively come 

 forth into light, but who have generally committed the error of supposing 

 that nothing whatever was known of the art of philosophizing by the old 

 logicians, because their modern interpreters have written to so little pur- 

 pose respecting it. 



We have to inquire, then, on the present occasion, not into Judgment, 

 but judgments; not into the act of believing, but into the thing believed. 

 What is the immediate object of belief in a Proposition? What is the 

 matter of fact signified by it? What is it to which, when I assert the 

 proposition, I give my assent, and call upon others to give theirs ? What is 

 that which is expressed by the form of discourse called a Proposition, and 

 the conformity of which to fact constitutes the truth of the proposition ? 



§ 2. One of the clearest and most consecutive thinkers whom this coun- 

 try or the world has produced, I mean Hobbes, has given the following an- 

 swer to this question. In every proposition (says he) what is signified is,- 

 the belief of the speaker that the predicate is a name of the same thing of . 

 which the subject is a name ; and if it really is so, the proposition is true.^^ 

 Thus the proposition, All men are living beings (he would say) is true, 

 because living being is a name of every thing of which man is a name. 

 All men are six feet high, is not true, because six feet high is not a name 

 of every thing (though it is of some things) of which man is a name. 



What is stated in this theory as the definition of a true proposition, must 

 be allowed to be a property which all true propositions possess. The sub- 

 ject and predicate being both of them names of things, if they were names 

 of quite different things the one name could not, consistently with its sig- 

 nification, be predicated of the other. If it be true that some men are cop- 

 per-colored, it must be true — and the proposition does really assert — that 

 among the individuals denoted by the name man, there are some who are 

 also among those denoted by the name copper-colored. If it be true that 

 all oxen ruminate, it must be true that all the individuals denoted by the 

 name ox are also among those denoted by the name ruminating ; and who- 

 ever asserts that all oxen ruminate, undoubtedly does assert that this rela- 

 tion subsists between the two names. 



The assertion, therefore, which, according to Hobbes, is the only one 

 made in any proposition, really is made in every proposition : and his anal- 

 ysis has consequently one of the requisites for being the true one. We 

 may go a step further; it is the only analysis that is rigorously true of all 

 propositions without exception. What he gives as the meaning of propo- 

 sitions, is part of the meaning of all propositions, and the whole meaning 

 of some. This, however, only shows what an extremely minute fragment 

 of meaning it is quite possible to include within the logical formula of a 

 proposition. It does not show that no proposition means more. To war- 

 rant us in putting together two words with a copula between them, it is 

 really enough that the thing or things denoted by one of the names should 

 be capable, without violation of usage, of being called by the other name also. 

 If, then, this be all the meaning necessarily implied in the form of discourse 

 called a Proposition, Avhy do I object to it as the scientific definition of what 

 a proposition means ? Because, though the mere collocation which makes 

 the proposition a pi"Oi30sition, conveys no more than this scanty amount of 



