72 



NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



exist, to be called by the name which 

 is reserved for rational beings. Ra- 

 tionality, in short, is involved in the 

 meaning of the word man : is one of 

 the attributes connoted by the name. 

 The essence of man, simply means 

 the whole of the attributes connoted 

 \)y the word ; and any one of those 

 attributes taken singly is an essential 

 property of man. 



But these reflections, so easy to us, 

 would have been difficult to persons 

 who thought, as most of the later 

 Aristotelians did, that objects were 

 made what they were called, that 

 gold (for instance) was made gold, not 

 by the possession of certain properties 

 to which mankind have chosen to 

 attach that name, but by participa- 

 tion in the nature of a certain general 

 substance, called gold in general, 

 which substance, together with all 

 the properties that belonged to it, 

 inhered in every individual piece of 

 gold.* As they did not consider 

 these universal substances to be at- 

 tached to all general names, but only 

 to some, they thought that an object 

 borrowed only a part of its properties 

 from an iiniversal substance, and that 

 the rest belonged to it individually : 

 the former they called its essence, 

 and the latter its accidents. The 

 scholastic doctrine of essences long 

 survived the theory on which it rested, 

 that of the existence of real entities 

 corresponding to general terms ; and 

 it was reserved for Locke at the end of 

 the seventeenth century, to convince 

 philosophers that the supposed essences 

 of classes were merely the significa- 

 tion of their names ; nor, among the 

 signal services which his writings ren- 

 dered to philosophy, was there one 

 more needful or more valuable. 



* The doctrines which prevented the 

 realmeaiiiiigof Essences from being under- 

 stood, had not 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. Aris- 

 totle himself (in his Treatise on the Cate- 

 gories) expressly denies that the Sevrepai 

 ova-ML, or substantice secundce, inhere in 

 a subject. They are only, he Bays, predi- 

 cated of it. 



Now, as the most familiar of the 

 general names by which an object is 

 designated usually connotes not one 

 only, but several attributes of the ob- 

 ject, each of which attributes sepa- 

 rately forms also the bond of union of 

 some class, and the meaning of some 

 general name ; we may predicate of a 

 name which connotes a variety of at- 

 tributes, another name which connotes 

 only one of these attributes, or some 

 smaller number of them than all. In 

 such cases, the universal affirmative 

 proposition will be true ; since what- 

 ever possesses the whole of any set of 

 attributes, must possess any part of 

 that same set. A proposition of this 

 sort, however, conveys no information 

 to any one who previously understood 

 the whole meaning of the terms. The 

 propositions. Every man is a corporeal 

 being. Every man is a living creature, 

 Every man is rational, convey no 

 knowledge to any one who was already 

 aware of the entire meaning of the 

 word man, for the meaning of the word 

 includes all this : and that every man 

 has the attributes connoted by all these 

 predicates, is already asserted when he 

 is called a man. Now, of this nature 

 are all the propositions which have 

 been called essential. They are, in 

 fact, identical propositions. 



It is true that a proposition which 

 predicates any attribute, even though 

 it be one implied in the name, is in 

 most cases understood to involve a 

 tacit assertion that there exists a thing 

 corresponding to the name, and pos- 

 sessing the attributes connoted by it ; 

 and this implied assertion may convey 

 information, even to those who under- 

 stood the meaning of the name. Bub 

 all information of this sort, conveyed 

 by all the essential propositions of 

 which man can be made the subject, 

 is included in the assertion, Men exist. 

 And this assumption of real existence 

 is, after all, the result of an imperfec- 

 tion of language. It arises from the 

 ambiguity of the copula, which, in 

 addition to its proper office of a mark 

 to show that an assertion is made, is 

 also, as formerly remarked, a concrete 



