90 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



gold in general, which substance, together with all the properties that be- 

 longed to it, inhered in every individual piece of gold.* As they did not 

 consider these universal substances to be attached to all general names, but 

 only to some, they thought that an object borrowed only a part of its prop- 

 erties from a universal substance, and that the rest belonged to it individu- 

 ally : the former they called its essence, and the latter its accidents. The 

 scholastic doctrine of essences long survived the theory on which it rested, 

 that of the existence of real entities corresponding to general terms ; and it 

 was reserved for Locke, at the end of the seventeenth century, to convince 

 philosophers that the supposed essences of classes were merely the signifi- 

 cation of their names; nor, among the signal services which his writings 

 rendered to philosophy, was there one more needful or more valuable. 



Now, as the most familiar of the general names by which an object is 

 designated usually connotes not one only, but several attributes of the ob- 

 ject, each of which attributes separately forms also the bond of union of 

 some class, and the meaning of some general name ; we may predicate of a 

 name which connotes a variety of attributes, another name which connotes 

 only one of these attributes, or some smaller number of them than all. In 

 such cases, the universal affirmative proposition will be true ; since what- 

 ever possesses the whole of any set of attributes, must possess any part of 

 that same set. A proposition of this sort, however, conveys no informa- 

 tion to any one who previously understood the whole meaning of the terms. 

 The propositions, Every man is a corporeal being, Every man is a living 

 creature. Every man is rational, convey no knowledge to any one who was 

 already aware of the entire meaning of the word man^ for the meaning of 

 the word includes all this: and that every man has the attributes connoted 

 by all these predicates, is already asserted when he is called a man. Now, 

 of this nature are all the propositions which have been called essential. 

 They are, in fact, identical propositions. 



It is true that a proposition which predicates any attribute, even though 

 it be one implied in the name, is in most cases understood to involve a tacit 

 assertion that there exists a thing corresponding to the name, and possess- 

 ing the attributes connoted by it ; and this implied assertion may convey 

 information, even to those who understood the meaning of the name. But 

 all information of this sort, conveyed by all the essential propositions of 

 which man can be made the subject, is included in the assertion. Men exist. 

 And this assumption of real existence is, after all, the result of an imper- 

 fection of language. It arises from the ambiguity of the copula, which, in 

 addition to its proper office of a mark to show that an assertion is made, is 

 also, as formerly remarked, a concrete word connoting existence. The act- 

 ual existence of the subject of the proposition is therefore only apparently, 

 not really, implied in the predication, if an essential one : we may say, A 

 ghost is a disembodied spirit, without believing in ghosts. But an acci- 

 dental, or non-essential, affirmation, does imply the real existence of the 

 subject, because in the case of a non-existent subject there is nothing for 

 the proposition to assert. Such a proposition as. The ghost of a murdered 

 person haunts the couch of the murderer, can only have a meaning if un- 

 derstood as implying a belief in ghosts; for since the signification of the 



* The doctrines which prevented the real meaning of Essences from being understood, had 

 not assumed so settled a shape in the time of Aristotle and his immediate followers, as was 

 afterward given to them by the Realists of the Middle Ages. Aristotle himself (in his Trea- 

 tise on the Categories) expressly denies that the devTE^aL ovaiai, or Substantiae Secundse, in- 

 here in a subject. They are only, he says, predicated of it. 



