THINGS DENOTED BY NAMES. 63 



should perhaps be suspected of thinking with some of 

 the ancients, that the cardinal virtues are animals ; or, 

 at the least, of holding with the Platonic school the 

 doctrine of self-existent Ideas, or with the followers of 

 Epicurus that of Sensible Forms, which detach them- 

 selves in every direction from bodies, and by coming 

 in contact with our organs, cause our perceptions. 

 We should be supposed, in short, to believe that 

 Attributes are Substances. 



In consequence of this perversion of the word 

 Being, philosophers looking about for something to 

 supply its place, laid their hands upon the word 

 Entity, a piece of barbarous Latin, invented by the 

 schoolmen to be used as an abstract name, in which 

 class its grammatical form would seem to place it ; but 

 being seized by logicians in distress to stop a leak in 

 their terminology, it has ever since been used as a 

 concrete name. The kindred word essence, born at 

 the same time, and of the same parents, scarcely 

 underwent a more complete transformation when, 

 from being the abstract of the verb to le, it came to 

 denote something sufficiently concrete to be inclosed 

 in a glass bottle. The word Entity, since it settled 

 down into a concrete name, has retained its univer- 

 sality of signification somewhat less unimpaired than 

 any of the names before mentioned. Yet the same 

 gradual decay to which, after a certain age, all the 

 language of psychology seems liable, has been at 

 work even here. If you call virtue an entity, you are 

 indeed somewhat less strongly suspected of believing 

 it to be a substance than if you called it a being ; but 

 you are by no means free from the suspicion. Every 

 word which was originally intended to connote mere 

 existence, seems, after a time, to enlarge its connota- 

 tion to separate existence, or existence freed from the 



