IMPORT OF PROPOSITIONS. 135 



which alone they manifest themselves to our faculties. 

 When we say, Socrates was contemporary with the 

 Peloponnesian war, the foundation of this assertion, 

 as of all assertions concerning substances, is an 

 assertion concerning the phenomena which they 

 exhibit, namely, that the series of facts by which 

 Socrates manifested himself to mankind, and the 

 series of mental states which constituted his earthly 

 existence, went on simultaneously with the series of 

 facts known by the name of the Peloponnesian war. 

 Still, the proposition does not assert that alone ; it 

 asserts that the Thing in itself, the noumenon Socrates, 

 was existing, and doing or experiencing those various 

 facts, during the same time. Coexistence and se- 

 quence, therefore, may be affirmed or denied not only 

 between phenomena, but between noumena, or between 

 a noumenon and phenomena. And there is one kind of 

 assertion which maybe made respecting noumena, inde- 

 pendently of the phenomena which are their sensible 

 manifestation ; the assertion of their simple existence. 

 But what is a noumenon? an unknown cause. In 

 affirming, therefore, the existence of a noumenon, we 

 affirm causation. Here, therefore, are two additional 

 kinds of fact, capable of being asserted in a proposi- 

 tion. Besides the propositions which assert Sequence 

 or Coexistence, there are some which assert simple 

 Existence; and others assert Causation, which, subject 

 to the explanations which will follow in the Third 

 Book, must be considered provisionally as a distinct 

 and peculiar kind of assertion. 



6. To these four kinds of matter-of-fact or 

 assertion, must be added a fifth, Resemblance. This 

 was a species of attribute which we found it impossible 

 to analyze ; for which no fundamentum, distinct from 



