A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. I — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. I
John Stuart Mill · en
[19] "Men are subject to err not only in affirming and denying, but also
in perception, and in silent cogitation.... Tacit errors, or the errors
of sense and cogitation, are made by passing from one imagination to the
imagination of another different thing; or by feigning that to be past,
or future, which never was, nor ever shall be; as when by seeing the
image of the sun in water, we imagine the sun itself to be there; or by
seeing swords, that there has been, or shall be, fighting, because it
uses to be so for the most part; or when from promises we feign the mind
of the promiser to be such and such; or, lastly, when from any sign we
vainly imagine something to be signified which is not. And errors of
this sort are common to all things that have sense."--_Computation or
Logic_, ch. v. sect. 1.
[20] Ch. iii. sect. 3.
[21] To the preceding statement it has been objected, that "we naturally
construe the subject of a proposition in its extension, and the
predicate (which therefore may be an adjective) in its intension,
(connotation): and that consequently coexistence of attributes does not,
any more than the opposite theory of equation of groups, correspond with
the living processes of thought and language." I acknowledge the
distinction here drawn, which, indeed, I had myself laid down and
exemplified a few pages back (p. 104). But though it is true that we
naturally "construe the subject of a proposition in its extension," this
extension, or in other words, the extent of the class denoted by the
name, is not apprehended or indicated directly. It is both apprehended
and indicated solely through the attributes. In the "living processes of
thought and language" the extension, though in this case really thought
of (which in the case of the predicate it is not), is thought of only
through the medium of what my acute and courteous critic terms the
"intension."
For further illustrations of this subject, see _Examination of Sir
William Hamilton's Philosophy_, ch. xxii.
[22] Book iv. ch. vii.
[23] The doctrines which prevented the real meaning of Essences from
being understood, 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. Aristotle himself (in his Treatise
on the Categories) expressly denies that the _δεύτεραι οὔσιαι_, or
Substantiæ Secundæ, inhere in a subject. They are only, he says,
predicated of it.