'32 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



of mind wrongly. Feelings, or states- of consciousness, are assuredly 

 to be counted among realities, but they cannot be reckoned either 

 among substances or attributes. 



§ 2. Before recommeticing, under better auspices, the attempt made 

 with such imperfect success by the great founder of the science of logic, 

 we must take notice of "an unfortunate ambiguity in all the concrete 

 names which correspond to the most general of all abstract terms, the 

 word Existence. When we have occasion for a name which shall be 

 capable of denoting whatever exists, as contradistinguished from non- 

 entity or Nothing, there is' hardly a word applicable to the purpose 

 which is not also, and even more familiarly, taken in a sense in which 

 it denotes only substances. But substances are not all that exist ; 

 attributes, if such things are to be spoken of, must be said to exist ; 

 feelings also exist. Yet when we speak of an object, or of a thing, we 

 are almost always supposed to mean a substance. There seems a kind 

 of contradiction in using such an expression as that one thing is merely 

 an attribute of another thing. And the announcement of a Classifica- 

 tion of Things would, I believe, prepare most i-eaders for an enumer- 

 ation like those in natural history, beginning with the great divisions 

 of animal, vegetable, and mineral, and subdividing them into classes 

 and orders. If, rejecting the word Thing,- we endeavot to find another 

 of a more general import, or at least more exclusively confined to that 

 general import, a word denoting all that exists, and connoting only simple 

 existence ; no word might be presumed fitter for such a purpose than 

 heing : originally the present participle of a verb which in one of its 

 meanings is exactly equivalent to the verb exist ; and therefore suitable, 

 even by its grammatical formation, to be the concrete of the abstract ex- 

 istence. But this word, str-ange as the fact may appear, is still more com- 

 pletely spoiled for the purpose which it seemed expressly made for, 

 than the word Thing. Being is, by custom, exactly synonymous with 

 substance ; except that it is free fi-om a slight taint of a second ambigu- 

 ity ; being applied impartially to matter and to mind, while substance, 

 though originally- and in strictness applicable to both, is apt to suggest 

 in preference the idea of matter. Attributes are never called Beings ; 

 nor are Feelings. A Being is that which excites feelings, and which 

 possesses attiibutes. The soul is called a Being ; God and angels are 

 called Beings ; but if we were to say, extension, color, wisdom, virtue 

 are beings, we should perhaj^s be suspected of thinking with some of 

 the ancients, that the cardinal virtues are animals ; or, at the least, of 

 holding with the Platonic school the doctrine of self-existent Ideas, or 

 witli the followers of Epicurus that of Sensible Forms, which detach 

 themselves in every direction from bodies, and by coming in contact 

 with our organs, cause our perceptions. We should be supposed, in 

 short, to believe that Attributes are Substances. 



In consequence of this perversion of the word Being, philosophers 

 looking about for something to supply its place, laid their hands upon 

 the word Entity, a piece of barbarous Latin, invented by the schoolmen 

 to be used as an absti^act name, in which class its grammatical foiTU 

 would seem to place it ; but being seized by logicians in distress to 

 stop a leak in their terminology, it has ever since been used as a con- 

 crete name. The kindred word essence, born at the same time, and of 

 the same parents, scarcely underwent a more complete transfoi'mation 



