62 



NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



truth and falsity completely arbitrary, 

 with no standard but the will of men, 

 it must not be concluded that either 

 Hobbes, or any of the other thinkers 

 who have in the main agreed with 

 him, did in fact consider the distinc- 

 tion between truth and error as less 

 real, or attached less importance to it, 

 than other people. To suppose that 

 they did so would argue total unac- 

 quaintance with their other specula- 

 tions. But this shows how little hold 

 their doctrine possessed over their 

 own minds. No person, at bottom, 

 even imagined that there was nothing 

 more in truth than propriety of ex- 

 pression ; than using language in 

 conformity to a previous convention. 

 When the inquiry was brought down 

 from generals to a particular case, it 

 has always been acknowledged that 

 there is a distinction between verbal 

 and real questions ; that some false 

 propositions are uttered from ignor- 

 ance of the meaning of words, but 

 that in others the source of the error 

 is a misapprehension of things ; that 

 a person who has not the use of 

 language at all may form propositions 

 mentally, and that they may be 

 untrue, that is, he may believe as 

 matters of fact what are not really 

 so. This last admission cannot be 

 made in stronger terms than it is by 

 Hobbes himself,* though he will not 

 allow such erroneous belief to be called 

 falsity, but only error. And he has 

 himself laid down, in other places, 



* "Men are subject to err not only in 

 affirming and denying, but also in percep- 

 tion, and in silent cogitation. . . . Tacit 

 errors, or the errors of sense and cogita- 

 tion, are made by passing from one imagi- 

 nation to the imagination of another dif- 

 ferent thing ; or by feigning that to be 

 past, or future, which never was, nor ever 

 shall be ; as when by seeing the image of 

 the sun in water, we imagine tiie sun itself 

 to be there ; or by seeing swords, that 

 there has been, or shall be, fighting, be- 

 cause 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 com- 

 mon to all things that have sense."— C<m»- 

 putaticn or Logic, ch. v. sect i. 



doctrines in which the true theory of 

 predication is by implication con- 

 tained. He distinctly says that general 

 names are given to things on account 

 of their attributes, and that abstract 

 names are the names of those attri- 

 butes. "Abstract is that which in 

 any subject denotes 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 

 manner by which anything works 

 upon our senses, but by most men 

 they are called accidents."* It is 

 strange that 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 because of an attribute, (or, as 

 he calls it, an accident,) our object is 

 not to affirm 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 attribute 

 which is possessed by the individual 

 object designated by the words "sum- 

 mit of Chimborazo ; " which attribute 

 consists in the physical fact of its 

 exciting in human beings the sensa- 

 tion which we call a sensation of 

 white. It will be admitted that, by 

 asserting the proposition, we wish to 

 communicate information of that phy- 

 sical fact, and are not thinking of the 

 names, except as the necessary means 

 of making that communication. The 

 meaning of the proposition, therefore, 

 is, that the individual thing denoted 

 by the subject, has the attributes con- 

 noted by the predicate. 



If we now suppose the subject also 

 to be a connotative name, the mean- 

 ing expressed by the proposition has 



* Ch. iii. sect. 3. 



