126 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



validity; it is clear that in the general estimation of 

 logicians, the propositions of which reasonings are 

 composed can be the expression of nothing but the 

 process of dividing things into classes, and referring 

 everything to its proper class. 



This theory appears to me a signal example of a 

 logical error very often committed in logic, that of 

 va-Tpov Trporepov, or explaining a thing by something 

 which presupposes it. When I say that snow is 

 white, I may and ought to be thinking of snow as a 

 class, because I am asserting a proposition as true of 

 all snow : but I am certainly not thinking of white 

 objects as a class ; I am thinking of no white object 

 whatever except snow, but only of that, and of the 

 sensation of white which it gives me. When, indeed, 

 I have judged, or assented to the propositions, that 

 snow is white, and that several other things also are 

 white, I gradually begin to think of white objects as a 

 class, including snow and those other things. But 

 this is a conception which followed, not preceded, 

 those judgments, and therefore cannot be given as an 

 explanation of them. Instead of explaining the effect 

 by the cause, this doctrine explains the cause by the 

 effect, and is, I conceive, founded upon a latent 

 misconception of the nature of classification. 



There is a sort of language very generally pre- 

 valent in these discussions, which seems to suppose 

 that classification is an arrangement and grouping 

 of definite and known individuals : that when names 

 were imposed, mankind took into consideration all 

 the individual objects in the universe, made them up 

 into parcels or lists, and gave to the objects of each 

 list a common name, repeating this operation to ties 

 quoties until they had invented all the general names 

 of which language consists ; which having been once 



