VERBAL AND REAL PROPOSITIONS. 75 



connoted by the word ; and any one of those attributes taken singly, is 

 an essential property of man. 



The doctiines which prevented the real meaning of Essences from 

 being understood, not having assumed so settled a shape in the time of 

 Aristotle and his immediate followers as was afterwards given to them 

 by the Realists of the middle ages, we find a nearer approach to tiiie 

 views of the subject in the writings of the ancient Aristotelians than in 

 their more modem followers. Poi-phyry, in his Lsagoge, approached so 

 near to the true conception of essences, that only one step remained to 

 be taken, but this stej?, so easy in appearance, was reserved for the 

 Nominalists of modern times. By altering any property, not of the 

 essence of the thing, you merely, according to Poq>hyry, made a differ- 

 ence in it ; you made it dXXolov : but by altering any property which 

 was of its essence, you made it another thing, aXko* To a modei-n it 

 is obvious that between the change which only makes a thing diiferent, 

 and the change which makes it another thing, the only distinction is 

 that in the one case, though changed, it is still called by the same name. 

 Thus, pound ice in a mortar, and being still called ice, it is only made 

 aXXolov : melt it, and it becomes aXXo, another thing, namely, water. 

 Now it is really the same thing, i. e., the same paiticles of matter, in 

 both cases ; and you cannot so change an\1;hing that it shall cease to be 

 the same tiling in this sense. The identity which it can be deprived 

 of is merely that of the name : when the thing ceases to be called ice, 

 it becomes another thing, its essence, what constitutes it ice, is gone; 

 while, so long as it continues to be so called, nothing is gone except 

 some of its accidents. But these reflections, so easy to us, would have 

 been difficult to persons who thought, as most of the AristoteliaiLS did, 

 that objects were made what they were called, that ice (for instance) 

 was made ice, not by the possession of certain properties to which 

 mankind have chosen to attach that name, but by participation in the 

 nature of a certain general substance, called Ice in general, which sub- 

 stance, together with all the propoities that belonged to it, inhered in 

 every indi\-idual piece of ice. As they did not consider these univei-sal 

 substances to be attached to all general names but only to some, they 

 thought that an object boiTowed only a part of its properties fi'om an 

 universal substance, and that the rest belonged to it individually : the 

 fonner they called its essence, and the latter its accidents. The scho- 

 lastic doctrine of essences long sur%'ived the theory on which it rested, 

 that of the existence of real entities corresponding to general terras ; 

 and it was reserved for Locke, at the end of the seventeenth century, 

 to convince philosoj^hers that the supposed essences of classes were 

 merely the signification of their names; nor, among the signal services 

 which that great man rendered to philosophy, was there one more 

 needful or more valuable.! 



♦ KaQolov /isv ovv rruaa (Jta^opri vpoiryivo/xhfT) rivl irepoiov ttoieV ulV a! fiiv kocvu^ 

 re Kai I6iu^ (differences in the accidental properties) uM.oiov noiovGiv al 6e idiairara, 

 (differences in the essential properties) uX?m. — Porph., Isag., cap. iii. 



t Few among the great names in philosophy have met with a harder measure of justice 

 from the present generation than Locke; the unquestioned founder of the analytic philos- 

 ophy of mind, but whose doctrines were first caricatured, then, when the reaction arrived, 

 ca^t off" by the prevailing school even with contumely, and who is now regarded by one of 

 the conflicting parties in philosophy as an apostle of heresy and sophistry, while among 

 those who still adhere to the standard which he raised, there has been a disposition in later 

 times to sacrifice his reputation in favor of Hobbes ; a great writer, and a great thinker for 

 his lime, but inferior to Locke not only in sober judgment but even in profundity and origi- 



