SPEECH, 167 



ness ; but did it affirm that 'the grass is green '? It may be 

 assumed that ' grass' and 'green ' together form one complex 

 object, which is an object under space and time, and therefore 

 of sense. But against this the rejoinder at once is, that the 

 sense may indeed take in and report (so to speak) a complex 

 object, but that in this case the question is, not about the com- 

 plex object, but about the coijiplexity of the object. It is one 

 thing to see green grass, and evidently quite another to affirm 

 the greetmess of the grass. The difference is all the difference 

 between seeing two things united, and seeing them as united. 

 ... If a brute could think * is,' brute and man would be 

 brothers. ' Is,' as the copula of a judgment, implies the 

 mental separation, and recombination of two terms that only 

 exist united in nature, and can therefore never have impressed 

 the sense except as one thing.* And 'is,' considered as a 

 substantive verb, as in the example ' This man is,' contains in 

 itself the application of the copula of judgment to the most 

 elementary of all abstractions — ' thing ' or ' something.' Yet if 

 a being has the power of thinking — ' thing,' it has the power 

 of transcending space and time by dividing or decomposing 

 the phenomenally one. Here is the point where instinct ends 

 and reason begins." \ 



It would be easy to add quotations from other writers to 

 the same effect as the above ; \ but these may be held sufficient 

 to give material for the first stage of my criticism, which is of 

 a purely technical character. I affirm that all writers who 

 thus take their stand upon the distinctively human faculty of 

 predication are taking their stand at the wrong place. In 

 other words, without at present disputing whether we have to 

 do with a distinction of kind or of degree, I say, and say con- 



* The statement conveyed in this sentence I am not able to understand, and 

 therefore will not hereafter endeavour to criticize. If it be taken literally — and I 

 know not in what other sense to take it — we must suppose the writer to mean 

 that "greenness" only occurs in "grass," or, which is the same thing, that only 

 grass is green. 



t Lessons from Nature^ pp. 226, 227. 



\ For instance, Professor Francis Bowen, of Harvard College, in an essay on 

 The Human and Brute Mind, Princeton KevieWy 1S80. 

 12 



