modifies A," since it can be more or less naturally expressed in the
perverted form, "If A had not had P it would have been different,"--a
form of words, which, as we saw, can also be used whenever P does, in
the proper sense, modify A.
I want to suggest, then, that one thing which is always implied by
the dogma that, "All relations are internal," is that, in the case of
every relational property, it can always be truly asserted of any term
A which has that property, that any term which had not had it would
necessarily have been different from A.
This is the proposition to which I want to direct attention. And there
are two phrases in it, which require some further explanation.
The first is the phrase "would necessarily have been." And the meaning
of this can be explained, in a preliminary way, as follows:--To say
of a pair of properties P and Q, that any term which had had P would
necessarily have had Q, is equivalent to saying that, in every case,
from the proposition with regard to any given term that it has P, it
_follows_ that that term has Q: _follows_ being understood in the sense
in which from the proposition with regard to any term, that it is a
right angle, it _follows_ that it is an angle, and in which from the
proposition with regard to any term that it is red it _follows_ that
it is coloured. There is obviously some very important sense in which
from the proposition that a thing is a right angle, it does follow
that it is an angle, and from the proposition that a thing is red it
does follow that it is coloured. And what I am maintaining is that the
metaphorical sense of "modify," in which it is maintained that all
relational properties modify the subjects which possess them, can be
defined by reference to this sense of "follows." The definition is: To
say of a given relational property P that it modifies or is internal to
a given term A which possesses it, is to say that from the proposition
that a thing has not got P it follows that that thing is different
from A. In other words, it is to say that the property of _not_
possessing P, and the property of being different from A are related
to one another in the peculiar way in which the property of being a
right-angled triangle is related to that of being a triangle, or that
of being red to that of being coloured.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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