66 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



falsity, but only eiTor. And, moreover, he has himself laid down, In 

 other places, doctrines in which the true theory of predication is by 

 implication contained. He distinctly says that general names are given 

 to things on account of their attributes, and that abstract names are the 

 names of those attributes. " Abstract is that which in any subject de- 

 notes the cause of the concrete name. .... And these causes of names 

 are the same with the causes of our conceptions, namely, some power 

 of action, or affection, of the thing conceived, which some call the man- 

 ner by which anything works upon ovu- senses, but by most men they 

 are called accidents^* It is strange tliat having gone so far, he should 

 not have gone one step farther, and seen that what he calls the cause 

 of the concrete name, is in reality the meaning of it ; and that when we 

 predicate of any subject a name which is given hecavse of an attribute 

 (or, as he calls it, an accident), our object is not to affimi the name, but, 

 by means of the name, to affirm the attribute. 



§ 4. Let the predicate be, as we have said, a connotative term; and 

 to take the simplest case first, let the subject be a proper name: "The 

 summit of Chimborazo is white." The word white connotes an attri- 

 bute which is possessed by the individual object designated by the 

 words, "summit of Chimborazo," which attribute consists in the phys- 

 ical fact of its exciting in human beings the sensation which we call a 

 sensation of white. It will be admitted that, by asserting the propo- 

 sition, we wish to communicate information of that physical fact, and 

 are not thinking of the names, except as the necessary means of ma- 

 king that communication. The meaning of the proposition, therefore, 

 is, that the indixddual thing denoted by the subject, has the attiibutes 

 connoted by the predicate. 



If we now suppose the subject also to be a connotative name, the 

 meaning expressed by the proposition has advanced a step further in 

 complication. Let us first suppose the proposition to be universal, as 

 well as affirmative : " All men are mortal." In this case, as in the 

 last, what the proposition asserts (or expresses a belief in), is, ot 

 course, that the objects denoted by the subject (man) possess the 

 attributes connoted by the predicate (mortal). But the characteristic 

 of this case is, that the objects are no longer individually designated. 

 They are pointed out only by some of their attributes : they are the 

 objects called men, that is, the beings possessing the attributes con- 

 noted by the name man; and the only thing known of them may be 

 those atti-ibutes : indeed, as the proposition is general, and the objects 

 denoted by the subject are therefore indefinite in number, most of them 

 are not known individually at all. The assertion, therefore, is not, as 

 before, that the atti-ibutes which the predicate connotes are possessed 

 by any given individual, or by any number of individuals previously 

 known as John, Thomas, Richard, &c., but that those attributes are 

 possessed by each and every individual possessing certain other attri- 



in silent cogitation Tacit errors, or the errors of sense and cogitation, are made by 



passing from one imagination to the imagination of another diflerent thing ; or by feigning 

 that to be past, or future, which never was, nor ever shall be; as when, by seeing the im- 

 age of the sun in water, we imagine the sun itself to be there; or by seeing swords, that 

 there has been, or shall be, fighting, because it uses to be so for the most part; or 

 when from promises we feign the mind of the promiser to be such and such ; or, lastly, 

 when from any sign we vainly imagine something to be signified which is not. And errors 

 of this sort are common to all thmgs that have sense." — Computatian or Logic, ch. v., sect. 1. 

 * lb., ch. iii., sect. 3. 



