80 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



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 any thing works upon our senses, but by 

 most men they are called accidents.^''* It is strange that having gone so 

 far, he should not have gone one step further, and seen that what he calls 

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

 when we pi'edicate of any subject a name which is given because of an at- 

 tribute (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 sum- 

 mit of Chimborazo is white." The word white connotes an attribute which 

 is possessed by the individual object designated by the words " summit of 

 Chimborazo ;" which attribute consists in the physical fact, of its exciting 

 in human beings the sensation which we call a sensation of white. It will 

 be admitted that, by asserting the proposition, we wish to communicate in- 

 formation of that physical fact, and are not thinking of the names, except 

 as the necessary means of making that communication. The meaning of 

 the proposition, therefore, is, that the individual thing denoted by the sub- 

 ject, has the attributes connoted by the predicate. 



If we now suppose the subject also to be a connotative name, the mean- 

 ing expressed by the proposition has advanced a step further in complica- 

 tion. Let us first suppose the proposition to be universal, as well as affirm- 

 ative: "All men are mortal." In this case, as in the last, what the propo- 

 sition asserts (or expresses a belief of) is, of course, that the objects de- 

 noted by the subject (man) possess the attributes connoted by the predi- 

 cate (mortal). But the characteristic of this case is, that the objects are 

 no longer individually designated. They are pointed out only by some of 

 their attributes : they are the objects called men, that is, possessing the at- 

 tributes connoted by the name man ; and the only thing known of them 

 may be those attributes : indeed, as the proposition is general, and the ob- 

 jects denoted by the subject are therefore indefinite in number, most of 

 them are not known individually at all. The assertion, therefore, is not, as 

 before, that the attributes which the pi'edicate connotes are possessed by 

 any given individual, or by any number of individuals previously known as 

 John, Thomas, etc., but that those attributes are possessed by each and ev- 

 ery individual possessing certain other attributes; that whatever has the 

 attributes connoted by the subject, has also those connoted by the predi- 

 cate ; that the latter set of attributes constantly accompany the former set. 

 Whatever has the attributes of man has the attribute of mortality; mortal- 

 ity constantly accompanies the attributes of man.f 



* Chap, iii., sect. 3. 



t To the preceding statement it has been objected, tliat " we naturally construe the subject 

 of a proposition in its extension, and the predicate (which therefore may be an adjective) in 

 its intension (connotation) : and that consequently co-existence of attributes does not, any 

 more than the opposite theory of equation of groups, correspond with the living processes of 

 thought and language." I acknowledge the distinction here drawn, which, indeed, I had my- 

 self laid down and exemplified a few pages back (p. 77). But though it is true that we nat- 

 urally "construe the subject of a proposition in its extension," this extension, or in other 

 words, the extent of the class denoted by the name, is not apprehended or indicated directly. 



