VERBAL AND REAL PROPOSITIONS. 155 



besides nominal essences, he admitted real essences, 

 or essences of individual objects, which he supposed to 

 be the causes of the sensible properties of those 

 objects. We know not, (said he,) what these are ; 

 (and this acknowledgment rendered the fiction com- 

 paratively innocuous;) but if we did, we could, from 

 them alone, demonstrate the sensible properties of 

 the object, as the properties of the triangle are demon- 

 strated from the definition of the triangle. I shall 

 have occasion to revert to this theory in treating of 

 Demonstration, and of the conditions under which one 

 property of a thing admits of being demonstrated from 

 another property. It is enough here to remark that 

 according to this definition, the real essence of an 

 object has, in the progress of physics, come to be 

 conceived as nearly equivalent, in the case of bodies, 

 to their corpuscular structure: what it is now sup- 

 posed to mean in the case of any other entities, I 

 would not take upon myself to define. 



4. An essential proposition, then, is one which 

 is purely verbal ; which asserts of a thing under a 

 particular name, only what is asserted of it in the 

 fact of calling it by that name ; and which therefore 

 either gives no information, or gives it respecting the 

 name, not the thing. Non-essential, or accidental 

 propositions, on the contrary, may be called Real Pro- 

 positions, in opposition to Verbal. They predicate of 

 a thing, some fact not involved in the signification of 

 the name by which the proposition speaks of it ; some 

 attribute not connoted by that name. Such are all 

 propositions concerning things individually designated, 

 and all general or particular propositions in which the 

 predicate connotes any attribute not connoted by the 

 subject. All these, if true, add to our knowledge : 



