Names which are positive in form are often negative in reality, and others are really positive though their form is negative. The word inconvenient, for example, does not express the mere absence of convenience; it expresses a positive attribute, that of being the cause of discomfort or annoyance. So the word unpleasant, notwithstanding its negative form, does not connote the mere absence of pleasantness, but a less degree of what is signified by the word painful, which, it is hardly necessary to say, is positive. Idle, on the other hand, is a word which, though positive in form, expresses nothing but what would be signified either by the phrase not working, or by the phrase not disposed to work; and sober, either by not drunk or by not drunken.

§ 6. The fourth principal division of names is into positive and negative. Positive, as man, tree, good; negative, as not-man, not-tree, not-good. To every positive concrete name, a corresponding negative one might be framed. After giving a name to any one thing, or to any plurality of things, we might create a second name which should be a name of all things whatever, except that particular thing or things. These negative names are employed whenever we have occasion to speak collectively of all things other than some thing or class of things. When the positive name is connotative, the corresponding negative name is connotative likewise; but in a peculiar way, connoting not the presence but the absence of an attribute. Thus, not-white denotes all things whatever except white things; and There is a class of names called connotes the attribute of not possess- privative. A privative name is equi ing whiteness. For the non-posses-valent in its signification to a positive sion of any given attribute is also an attribute, and may receive a name as such; and thus negative concrete names may obtain negative abstract names to correspond to them.*

suited to the purpose to which they applied it, be diverted from that purpose by being taken to fulfil another, for which it does not seem to me to be at all required; I am unable to find any expression to replace it, but such as are commonly employed in a sense so much more general, that it would be useless attempting to associate them peculiarly with this precise idea. Such are the words, to involve, to imply, &c. By employing these, I should fail of attain ing the object for which alone the name is needed, namely, to distinguish this particular kind of involving and implying from all other kinds, and to assure to it

the degree of habitual attention which its importance demands.

Professor Bain (Logic, i. 56) thinks that negative names are not names of all things whatever except those denoted by the correlative positive name, but only for all things of some particular class: not-white, for instance, he deems not to be a name for everything in nature except white things, but only for every coloured thing other than white. In this case, however, as in all others, the test of what a name denotes is what it can be predicated of; and we can certainly predicate of a sound, or a smell, that it is not white. The affirma tion and the negation of the same attribute

and a negative name taken together; being the name of something which has once had a particular attribute, or for some other reason might have been expected to have it, but which has it not. Such is the word blind, which is not equivalent to not seeing, or to not capable of seeing, for it would not, except by a poetical or rhetorical figure, be applied to stocks and stones. A thing is not usually said to be blind, unless the class to which it is most familiarly referred, or to which it is referred on the particular occasion, be chiefly composed of things which can see, as in the case of a blind man, or a blind horse; or unless it is supposed for any reason that it ought to see; as in saying of a man, that he rushed blindly into an abyss, or of philosophers or the clergy that the greater part of them are blind guides. The names called privative, therefore, connote two things; the absence of certain attributes, and the presence of others, from which the presence also of the former might naturally have been expected.

cannot but divide the whole field of predi cation between them.

§ 7. The fifth leading division of names is into relative and absolute, or let us rather say, relative and nonrelative; for the word absolute is put upon much too hard duty in metaphysics, not to be willingly spared when its services can be dispensed with. It resembles the word civil in the language of jurisprudence, which stands for the opposite of criminal, the opposite of ecclesiastical, the opposite of military, the opposite of political-in short, the opposite of any positive word which wants a negative.

Relative names are such as father, son; ruler, subject; like, equal; unlike, unequal; longer, shorter; cause, effect. Their characteristic property is, that they are always given in pairs. Every relative name which is predicated of an object, supposes another object (or objects), of which we may predicate either that same name or another relative name which is said to be the correlative of the former. Thus, when we call any person a son, we suppose other persons who must be called parents. When we call any event a cause, we suppose another event which is an effect. When we say of any distance that it is longer, we suppose another distance which is shorter. When we say of any object that it is like, we mean that it is like some other object, which is also said to be like the first. In this last case both objects receive the same name; the relative term is its own correlative.

what nature is the attribute? Wherein consists the peculiarity in the connotation of a relative name?

The attribute signified by a relative name, say some, is a relation; and this they give, if not as a sufficient explanation, at least as the only one attainable. If they are asked, What, then, is a relation? they do not profess to be able to tell. It is generally regarded as something peculiarly recondite and mysterious. I cannot, however, perceive in what respect it is more so than any other attribute; indeed, it appears to me to be so in a somewhat less degree. I conceive rather, that it is by examining into the signification of relative names, or, in other words, into the nature of the attribute which they connote, that a clear insight may best be obtained into the nature of all attributes: of all that is meant by an attribute.

It is obvious, in fact, that if we take any two correlative names, father and son for instance, though the objects de-noted by the names are different, they both, in a certain sense, connote the same thing. They cannot, indeed, be said to connote the same attribute: to be a father, is not the saine thing as to be a son. But when we call one man a father, another a son, what we mean to affirm is a set of facts, which are exactly the same in both cases. Το predicate of A that he is the father of B, and of B that he is the son of A, is to assert one and the same fact It is evident that these words, in different words. The two prowhen concrete, are, like other con- positions are exactly equivalent: crete general names, connotative; neither of them asserts more or they denote a subject, and connote asserts less than the other. The an attribute; and each of them has paternity of A and the filiety of B or might have a corresponding ab- are not two facts, but two modes of stract name, to denote the attribute expressing the same fact. That fact, connoted by the concrete. Thus the when analysed, consists of a series of concrete like has its abstract likeness; physical events or phenomena, in the concretes, father and son, have, which both A and B are parties conor might have, the abstracts, pater-cerned, and from which they both nity, and filiety, or sonship. The derive names. What those names concrete name connotes an attribute, really connote, is this series of events : and the abstract name which answers that is the meaning, and the whole to it denotes that attribute. But of meaning, which either of them is

ferred to the achievement in a derivative signification, supposed to be somewhat like the primitive one. The word, however, is just as properly two names instead of one, in this case, as in that of the most perfect ambiguity. And one of the commonest forms of fallacious reasoning arising from ambiguity, is that of arguing from a metaphorical expression as if it were literal; that is, as if a word, when applied metaphorically, were the same name as when taken in its original sense which will be seen more particularly in its place.

CHAPTER III.

OF THE THINGS DENOTED BY NAMES.

an enumeration of all kinds of Things which are capable of being made predicates, or of having anything predicated of them: after which to determine the import of Predication, that is, of Propositions, can be no arduous task. The necessity of an enumeration of Existence, as the basis of Logic, did not escape the attention of the schoolmen, and of their master Aristotle, the most comprehensive, if not also the most sagacious, of the ancient philosophers. The Categories, or Predicaments-the former a Greek word, the latter its literal translation in the Latin language-were believed to be an enumeration of all things capable of being named; an enumeration by the summa genera, i.e., the most extensive classes into which things could be distributed; which, therefore, were so many highest Predicates, one or other of which was supposed capable of being affirmed with truth of every nameable thing whatsoever. The following are the classes into which, according to this school of philosophy, Things in general might be reduced:

Οὐσία,

Ποσόν,

Ποιόν,

Πρός τι,
Ποιεῖν,
Πάσχειν,

Ποῦ,

Πότε,
Κεῖσθαι,
Έχειν,

Substantia.
Quantitas.
Qualitas.
Relatio.

Actio.

Passio.

Ubi.

Quando.

Situs.
Habitus.

§ I. LOOKING back now to the commencement of our inquiry, let us attempt to measure how far it has advanced. Logic, we found, is the Theory of Proof. But proof supposes something provable, which must be a Proposition or Assertion; since nothing but a Proposition can be an object of belief, or therefore of proof. A Proposition is, discourse which affirms or denies something of some other thing. This is one step: there must, it seems, be two things concerned in every act of belief. But what are these Things? They can be no other than those signified by the two names, which being joined The imperfections of this classificatogether by a copula constitute the tion are too obvious to require, and Proposition. If, therefore, we knew its merits are not sufficient to reward, what all names signify, we should a minute examination. It is a mere know everything which, in the exist- catalogue of the distinctions rudely ing state of human knowledge, is cap-marked out by the language of familiar able either of being made a subject of affirmation or denial, or of being itself affirmed or denied of a subject. We have accordingly, in the preceding chapter, reviewed the various kinds of Names, in order to ascertain what is signified by each of them. And we have now carried this survey far enough to be able to take an account of its results, and to exhibit

life, with little or no attempt to penetrate, by philosophic analysis, to the rationale even of those common distinctions. Such an analysis, however superficially conducted, would have shown the enumeration to be both redundant and defective. Some objects are omitted, and others repeated several times under different heads. It is like a division of animals into