92 ' NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



have now explained them. Noi* is any thing wanting to render the third 

 book of Locke's Essay a nearly unexceptional treatise on the connotation 

 of names, except to free its language from the assumption of what are 

 called Abstract Ideas, which unfortunately is involved in the phraseology, 

 though not necessarily connected with the thoughts contained in that im- ' 

 mortal Third Book.* But besides nominal essences, he admitted real es- 

 sences, or essences of individual objects, which he supposed'to be the causes 

 of the sensible properties of those objects. We know not (said he) what 

 these are (and this acknowledgment rendered the fiction comparatively in- 

 nocuous) ; but if we did, we could, from them alone, demonstrate the sen- 

 sible properties of the object, as the properties of the triangle are demon- 

 strated from the definition of the triangle. I shall have occasion to revert 

 to this theory in treating of Demonstration, and of the conditions under 

 which one property of a thing admits of being demonstrated from another 

 property. It is enough here to remark that, according to this definition, 

 the real essence of an object has, in the progress of physics, come to be 

 conceived as nearly equivalent, in the case of bodies, to their corpuscular 

 structure : what it is now supposed to mean in the case of any other en- 

 tities, I would not take upon myself to define. 



§ 4. An essential proposition, then, is one which is purely verbal ; which 

 asserts of a thing under a particular name, only what is asserted of it in 

 the fact of calling it by that name ; and which, therefore, either gives no 

 information, or gives it respecting the name, not the thing. ISTon-essential, 

 or accidental propositions, on the contrary, may be called Real Proposi- 

 tions, in opposition to Verbal. They predicate of a thing some fact not 

 involved in the signification of the name by which the proposition speaks 

 of it; some attribute not connoted by that name. Such are all proposi- 

 tions concerning things individually designated, and all general or partic- 

 ular propositions in which the predicate connotes any attribute not con- 

 noted by the subject. All these, if true, add to our knowledge : they con- 

 vey information, not already involved in the names employed. When I 

 am told that all, or even that some objects, which have certain qualities, or 

 which stand in certain relations, have also certain other qualities, or stand 

 in certain other relations, I learn from this pi'oposition a new fact; a fact 

 not included in my knowledge of the meaning of the words, nor even of 

 the existence of Things answering to the signification of those words. It 

 is this class of propositions only which are in themselves instructive, or 

 from which any instructive propositions can be inferred. f 



Nothing has probably contributed more to the opinion so long prevalent 

 of the futility of the school logic, than the circumstance that almost all the 

 examples used in the common school books to illustrate the doctrine of 



* The always acute and often profound author of An Outline of Sematology (Mr. B. H. 

 Smart) justly says, "Locke will be much more intelligible, if, in the majority of places, we 

 substitute 'the knowledge of for what he calls 'the Idea of" (p. 10). Among the many 

 criticisms on Locke's use of the word Idea, this is the one which, as it appears to me, most 

 nearly hits the mark ; and I quote it for the additional reason that it precisely expresses the 

 point of difference respecting the import of Propositions, between my view and what I have 

 spoken of as the Conceptualist view of them. Where a Conceptualist says that a name or a 

 proposition expresses our Idea of a thing, I should generally say (instead of our Idea) our 

 Knowledge, or Belief, concerning the thing itself. 



t This distinction corresponds to that which is drawn by Kant and other metaphysicians 

 between what they term analytic and synthetic, judgments ; the former being those which can 

 be evolved from the meaning of the terms used. 



