IMPORT OF PROPOSITIONS. ^9 - 



It will appear hereafter, in treating of reasoning, how much the theory 

 of that intellectual process has been vitiated by the influence of these erro- 

 neous notions, and by the habit which they exemplify of assimilating all 

 the operations of the human understanding which have truth for their ob- 

 ject, to processes of mere classification and naming. Unfortunately, the 

 minds which have been entangled in this net are precisely thqse which have 

 escaped the other cardinal error commented upon in the beginning of the 

 present chapter. Since the revolution which dislodged Aristotle from the 

 schools, logicians may almost be divided into those who have looked upon 

 reasoning as essentially an affair of Ideas, and those who have looked upon 

 it as essentially an affair of Names. 



Although, however, Hobbes's theory. -OlJEredication, according to the i 

 well-known remark of Leibnitz, and the avowal of Hobbes himself,* renders 1 

 truth and falsity completely arbitrary, with no standard but the will of 

 men, it must not be concluded that either Hobbes, or any of the other 

 thinkers who have in the main agreed with him, did in fact consider the 

 distinction between truth and error as less real, or attached less importance 

 to it, than other people. To suppose that they did so would argue total 

 unacquaintance with their other speculations. But this shows how little 

 hold their doctrine possessed over their owm minds. No person, at bot- 

 tom, ever imagined that there was nothing more in truth than propriety of 

 expression ; than using language in conformity to a previous convention. 

 When the inquiry was brought down from generals to a particular case, it 

 has always been acknowledged that there is a distinction between verbal 

 and real questions ; that some false propositions are uttered from ignorance 

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

 misapprehension of things ; that a person who has not the use of language 

 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 ad- 

 mission can not be made in stronger terras than it is by Hobbes himself,f 

 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 contained. He distinctly 



the word Class has two meanings; "the class definite, and the class indefinite. The class 

 definite is an enumeration of actual individuals, as the Peers of the Realm, the oceans of the 

 globe, the known planets. . . . The class indefinite is unenumerated. Such classes are 

 stars, planets, gold-bearing rocks, men, poets, virtuous. ... In this last acceptation of the 

 word, class name and general name are identical. The class name denotes an indefinite num- 

 ber of individuals, and connotes the points of community or likeness." 



The theory controverted in the text, tacitly supposes all classes to be definite. I have as- 

 sumed them to be indefinite ; because, for the purposes of Logic, definite classes, as such, are 

 almost useless ; though often serviceable as means of abridged expression. (Vi(j,e infra, book 

 iii., chap, ii.) 



* "From hence also this may be deduced, that the first truthswere'arbitrarily made by 

 those that first of all imposed names upon things, or received them from the imposition of oth- 

 ers. For it is true (for example) that man is a living creature, but it is for this reason, that it 

 pleased men to impose both these names on the same thing." — Computation or Logic, chap, 

 iii., sect. 8. 



t " 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 pass- 

 ing 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." — Computation or Logic, chap, v., sect. 1. 



