150 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



its properties from an universal substance, and that 

 the rest belonged to it individually: the former they 

 called its essence, and the latter its accidents. The 

 scholastic doctrine of essences long survived the 

 theory on which it rested, that of the existence of real 

 entities corresponding to general terms ; and it was 

 reserved for Locke, at the end of the seventeenth 

 century, to convince philosophers that the supposed 

 essences of classes were merely the signification of 

 their names ; nor, among the signal services which that 

 great man rendered to philosophy, was there one more 

 needful or more valuable*. 



Now, as the most familiar of the general names 

 predicable of an object usually connotes not one only, 



* Few among the great names in philosophy have met with a 

 harder measure of justice from the present generation than Locke; 

 the unquestioned founder of the analytic philosophy of mind, but 

 whose doctrines were first caricatured, then, when the reaction 

 arrived, cast off by the prevailing school even with contumely, and 

 who is now regarded by one of the conflicting parties in philosophy 

 as an apostle of heresy and sophistry, while among those who still 

 adhere to the standard which he raised, there has been a disposition 

 in later times to sacrifice his reputation in favour of Hobbes ; a 

 great writer, and a great thinker for his time, but inferior to Locke 

 not only in sober judgment but even in profundity and original 

 genius. Locke, the most candid of philosophers, and one whose 

 speculations bear on every subject the strongest marks of having 

 been wrought out from the materials of his own mind, has been 

 mistaken for an unworthy plagiarist, while Hobbes has been extolled 

 as having anticipated many of his leading doctrines. He did anti- 

 cipate many of them, and the present is an instance in what manner 

 it was generally done. They both rejected the scholastic doctrine 

 of essences; but Locke understood and explained what these sup- 

 posed essences really were; Hobbes, instead of explaining the dis- 

 tinction between essential and accidental properties, and between 

 essential and accidental propositions, jumped over it, and gave a 

 definition which suits at most only essential propositions, and 

 scarcely those, as the definition of Proposition in general. 



