language, predication can scarcely be said to have been differentiated from what I have called indication. For the sake of placing this important fact beyond the reach of doubt, I will begin by quoting the statements of a few among the leading authorities upon the philology of the subject. “Primitive man would not trouble himself much with such propositions as ‘Man is mortal,’ ‘Gold is heavy,’ which are a source of such unfailing delight to the formal logician; but if he found it necessary to employ permanent attribute-words, would naturally throw them into what is called the attributive form, by placing them in immediate proximity with the noun, whose inflections they would afterwards assume. And so the verb gradually came to assume the purely formal function of predication. The use of verbs denoting action necessitated the formation of verbs to denote ‘rest,’ ‘continuance in state,’ and when, in course of time, it became necessary in certain cases to predicate permanent as well as changing attributes, these words were naturally employed for the purpose, and such a sentence as ‘The sun continues bright’ was simply ‘The bright sun’ in another form. By degrees these verbs became so worn away in meaning, gradually coming to signify simple existence, that at last they lost all vestiges of meaning whatever, and came simply to be marks of predication. Such is the history of the verb ‘to be,’ which in popular language has entirely lost even the sense of ‘existence.’ Again, in a still more advanced state, it was found necessary to speak, not only of things, but of their attributes. Thus such a sentence as ‘Whiteness is an attribute of snow,’ has identically the same meaning as ‘Snow is white’ and ‘White snow;’ and the change of ‘white’ into ‘whiteness’ is a purely formal device to enable us to place an attribute-word as the subject of a proposition.”[251]