IMPORT OF PROPOSITIONS. 137 



metal, or the class man, is grounded indeed upon a 

 resemblance among the things which are placed in 

 the same class, but not upon a mere general resem- 

 blance : the resemblance it is grounded upon consists 

 in the possession by all those things, of certain common 

 peculiarities ; and those peculiarities it is which the 

 terms connote, and which the propositions conse- 

 quently assert ; not the resemblance : for though 

 when I say,, Gold is a metal, I say by implication 

 that if there be any other metals it must resemble 

 them, yet if there were no other metals I might still 

 assert the proposition with the same meaning as at pre- 

 sent , namely, that gold has the various properties im- 

 plied in the word metal ; just as it might be said, Chris- 

 tians are men, even if there were no men who were 

 not Christians ; or as the expression, Jehovah is God, 

 might be used by the firmest believer in the unity of 

 the godhead. Propositions, therefore, in which ob- 

 jects are referred to a class because they possess the 

 attributes constituting the class, are so far from 

 asserting nothing but resemblance, that they do not, 

 properly speaking, assert resemblance at all. 



But we remarked some time ago (and the reasons 

 of the remark will be more fully entered into in a 

 subsequent Book), that there is sometimes a conve- 

 nience in extending the boundaries of a class so as to 

 include things which possess in a very inferior degree, 

 if in any, the characteristic properties of the class, 

 provided they resemble that class more than any 

 other, insomuch that the general propositions which 

 are true of the class will be nearer to being true of 

 those things than any other equally general proposi- 

 tions. As, for instance, there are substances called 

 metals which have very few of the properties by which 

 rnetals are commonly recognised ; and almost every 



