The doctrine of the _Categories_ is still on the same level of
thought,[38] though its grammatico-logical analysis is the more advanced
one which had probably been developed by the Academy before Aristotle
came to think of his friends there as "them" rather than "us." It is
what in one direction gave the now familiar classification of parts of
speech, in the other that of thought-categories underlying them. If we
abstract from any actual combination of subject and predicate and
proceed to determine the types of predicate asserted in simple
propositions of fact, we have on the one hand a subject which is never
object, a "first substance" or concrete thing, of which may be
predicated in the first place "second substance" expressing that it is a
member of a concrete class, and in the second place quantity, quality,
correlation, action and the like. The list follows the forms of the
Greek language so closely that a category emerges appropriated to the
use of the perfect tense of the middle voice to express the relation of
the subject to a garb that it dons. In all this the individual is the
sole self-subsistent reality. Truth and error are about the individual
and attach or detach predicates correctly and incorrectly. There is no
committal to the metaphysics in the light of which the logical inquiry
is at last to find its complete justification. The point of view is to
be modified profoundly by what follows--by the doctrine of the
class-concept behind the class, of the form or idea as the constitutive
formula of a substance, or, again, by the requirement that an essential
attribute must be grounded in the nature or essence of the substance of
which it is predicated, and that such attributes alone are admissible
predicates from the point of view of the strict ideal of science. But we
are still on the ground of common opinion, and these doctrines are not
yet laid down as fundamental to the development.
The Topics.
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