52 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



1st. Feelings, or States of Consciousness. 



Snd. The Minds which experience those feehngs. 



3rd. The Bodies, or external objects, which excite certain of those 

 feelings, together with the powers or properties whereby they excite 

 them ; these last being included rather in compliance with common 

 opinion, and because their existence is taken for gi-anted in the com- 

 mon language from which I cannot prudently deviate, than because the 

 recognition of such powers or properties as real existences appears to 

 me warranted by a sound philosophy. 



4th, and last. The Successions and Co-existences, the Likenesses 

 and Unlikenesses, between feelings or states of consciousness. Those 

 relations, when considered as subsisting between other things, exist in 

 reality only between the states of consciousness which those things, if 

 bodies, excite, if minds, either excite or experience. 



This, until a better can be suggested, must serve us as a substitute 

 for the abortive Classification of Existences, termed the Categories of 

 Aristotle. The practical application of it will appear when we com- 

 mence the inquiiy into the Import of Propositions ; in other words, 

 when we inquire what it is which the mind actually believes, when it 

 gives what is called its assent to a proposition. 



These four classes comprising, if the classification be correct, all 

 Nameable Things, these or some of them must of covirse compose the 

 signification of all names; and of these or some of them is made up 

 whatever we call a fact. 



For distinction's sake, every fact which is solely composed of feel- 

 ings or states of consciousness considered as such, is often called a 

 Psychological or Subjective fact; while every fact which is composed, 

 either wholly or in part, of something different from these, that is, of 

 substances and attributes, is called an Objective fact. We may say, 

 then, that every objective fact is gi'ounded on a cori'esponding subjec- 

 tive one ; and has no meaning to us (apart from the subjective fact 

 which corresponds to it), except as a name for the unknown and in- 

 scrutable process by which that subjective or psychological fact is 

 brought to pass. 



CHAPTER IV. 



OP PROPOSITIONS, 



§ 1. In treating of Propositions, as already in treating of Names, 

 some considerations of a comparatively elementary nature respecting 

 their form and varieties must be premised, before entering upon that 

 analysis of the import conveyed by tliem, which is the real subject and 

 purpose of this preliminary book. 



A proposition, we have before said, is a portion of discourse in which 

 a predicate is affirmed or denied of a subject. A predicate and a sub- 

 ject are all that is necessarily required to make vip a proposition : but 

 as we cannot conclude from merely seeing two names put together, 

 that they are a predicate and a subject, that is, that one of them is in- 

 tended to be affirmed or denied of the other, it is necessary that there 



