152 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



its proper office of a mark to show that an assertion is 

 made, is also, as we have formerly remarked, a con- 

 crete word connoting existence. The actual existence 

 of the subject of the proposition is therefore only 

 apparently., not really, implied in the predication, if 

 an essential one : we may say, A ghost is a disembodied 

 spirit, without believing in ghosts. But an acci- 

 dental, or non-essential, affirmation, does imply the 

 real existence of the subject, because in the case of a 

 non-existent subject there is nothing for the propo- 

 sition to assert. Such a proposition as, The ghost of 

 a murdered person haunts the couch of the murderer, 

 can only have a meaning if understood as implying 

 a belief in ghosts ; for since the signification of the 

 word ghost implies nothing of the kind, the speaker 

 either means nothing, or means to assert a thing 

 which he wishes to be believed really to have taken 

 place. 



It will be hereafter seen that when any important 

 consequences seem to follow, as in mathematics, from 

 an essential proposition, or, in other words, from a 

 proposition involved in the meaning of a name, what 

 they really flow from is the tacit assumption of the 

 real existence of the object so named. Apart from 

 this assumption of real existence, the class of propo- 

 sitions in which the predicate is of the essence of the 

 subject (that is, in which the predicate connotes the 

 whole or part of what the subject connotes, but 

 nothing besides,) answer no purpose but that of 

 unfolding the whole or some part of the meaning of 

 the name, to those who did not previously know it. 

 Accordingly, the most useful, and in strictness the 

 only useful, kind of essential propositions, are Defi- 

 nitions : which, to be complete, should unfold the 

 whole of what is involved in the meaning of the word 



