134 REASONING. 



be, solemn trifling. The dictum de omni is on a par with another truth, 

 which in its time was also reckoned of great importance, " Whatever is, 

 is." To give any real meaning to the dictum de omni, we must consider 

 it not as an axiom, but as a definition ; we must look upon it as intended 

 to explain, in a circuitous and paraphrastic manner, the meaning of the 

 word class. 



An error which seemed finally refuted and dislodged from thought, often 

 needs only put on a new suit of phrases, to be welcomed back to its old 

 quarters, and allowed to repose unquestioned for another cycle of ages. 

 Modern philosophers have not been sparing in their contempt for the scho- 

 lastic dogma that genera and species are a peculiar kind of substances, which 

 general substances being the only permanent things, while the individual 

 substances comprehended under them are in a perpetual flux, knowledge, 

 which necessarily imports stability, can only have relation to those general 

 substances or universals, and not to the facts or particulars included un- 

 der them. Yet, though nominally rejected, this very doctrine, whether dis- 

 guised under the Abstract Ideas of Locke (whose speculations, however, it 

 has less vitiated than those of perhaps any other writer who has been in- 

 fected with it), under the ulti*a-nominalism of Hobbes and Condillac, or the 

 ontology of the later German schools, lias never ceased to poison philosophy. 

 Once accustomed to consider scientific investigation as essentially consist- 

 ing in the study of universals, men did not drop this habit of thought when 

 they ceased to regard universals as possessing an independent existence: 

 and even those who went the length of considering them as mere names, 

 could not free themselves from the notion that the investigation of truth 

 consisted entirely or partly in some kind of conjuration or juggle with those 

 names. When a philosopher adopted fully the Nominalist view of the 

 signification of general language, retaining along with it the dictum de 

 omni as the foundation of all reasoning, two such premises fairly put to- 

 gether were likely, if he was a consistent thinker, to land him in rather 

 startling conclusions. Accordingly it has been seriously held, by writers 

 of deserved celebrity, that the process of arriving at new truths by reason- 

 ing consists in the mere substitution of one set of arbitrary signs for an- 

 other; a doctrine which they suppose to derive irresistible confirmation 

 from the example of algebra. If there were any process in sorcery or 

 necromancy more preternatural than this, I should be much surprised. 

 The culminating point of this philosophy is the noted aphorism of Condil- 

 lac, that a science is nothing, or scarcely any thing, but taie Icmgue Men 

 faite; in other words, that the one sufticient rule for discovering the nature 

 and properties of objects is to name them properly : as if the reverse were 

 not the truth, that it is impossible to name them properly except in propor- 

 tion as we are already acquainted with their nature and properties. Can 

 it bo necessary to say, that none, not even the most trivial knowledge with 

 respect to Things, ever was or could be originally got at by any conceivable 

 manipulation of mere names, as such ; and that what can be learned from 

 names, is only what somebody who used the names knew befoi*e ? Philo- 

 sophical analysis confirms the indication of common sense, that the func- 

 tion of names is but that of enabling us to remember and to communicate 

 our thoughts. That they also strengthen, even to an incalculable extent, 

 the power of thought itself, is most true : but they do this by no intrinsic 

 and peculiar virtue ; they do it by the power inherent in an artificial mem- 

 ory, an instrument of which few have adequately considered the immense 

 potency. As an artificial memory, language truly is, what it has so often 



