130 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



belief to be called falsity, but only error. And, more- 

 over, he has himself laid down, in other places, 

 doctrines in which the true theory of predication is 

 by implication contained. He distinctly says that 

 general names are given to things on account of their 

 attributes, and that abstract names are the names of 

 those attributes. " Abstract is that which in any 

 subject denotes the cause of the concrete name . . 

 And these causes of names are the same with the 

 causes of our conceptions, namely, some power of 

 action, or affection, of the thing conceived, which 

 some call the manner by which anything works upon 

 our senses, but by most men they are called acci- 

 dents*.' 9 It is strange that having gone so far, he 

 should not have gone one step farther, and seen that 

 what he calls the cause of the concrete name, is in 

 reality the meaning of it ; and that when we predicate 

 of any subject a name which is given because of an 

 attribute (or, as he calls it, an accident), our object is 

 not to affirm the name, but, by means of the name, 

 to affirm the attribute. 



4. Let the predicate be, as we have said, a con- 

 notative term j and to take the simplest case first, let 

 the subject be a proper name : " The summit of 

 Chimborazo is white." The word white connotes an 

 attribute which is possessed by the individual object 

 designated by the words, " summit of Chimborazo," 

 which attribute consists in the physical fact, of its 



and such; or, lastly, when from any sign we vainly imagine some- 

 thing to be signified which is not. And errors of this sort are 

 common to all things that have sense." Computation or Logic, 

 ch. v., sect. 1. 



* II., ch. Hi., sect. 3. 



