A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. I
John Stuart Mill · en
4th, and last. The Successions and Co-existences, the Likenesses and
Unlikenesses, between feelings or states of consciousness. Those
relations, when considered as subsisting between other things, exist in
reality only between the states of consciousness which those things, if
bodies, excite, if minds, either excite or experience.
This, until a better can be suggested, may serve as a substitute for the
abortive Classification of Existences, termed the Categories of
Aristotle. The practical application of it will appear when we commence
the inquiry into the Import of Propositions; in other words, when we
inquire what it is which the mind actually believes, when it gives what
is called its assent to a proposition.
These four classes comprising, if the classification be correct, all
Nameable Things, these or some of them must of course compose the
signification of all names; and of these, or some of them, is made up
whatever we call a fact.
For distinction's sake, every fact which is solely composed of feelings
or states of consciousness considered as such, is often called a
Psychological or Subjective fact; while every fact which is composed,
either wholly or in part, of something different from these, that is, of
substances and attributes, is called an Objective fact. We may say,
then, that every objective fact is grounded on a corresponding
subjective one; and has no meaning to us, (apart from the subjective
fact which corresponds to it,) except as a name for the unknown and
inscrutable process by which that subjective or psychological fact is
brought to pass.
CHAPTER IV.
OF PROPOSITIONS.
§ 1. In treating of Propositions, as already in treating of Names, some
considerations of a comparatively elementary nature respecting their
form and varieties must be premised, before entering upon that analysis
of the import conveyed by them, which is the real subject and purpose of
this preliminary book.