United States or Netherlands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Bare activity would thus be predicable, though there were no definite direction, no actor, and no aim. Mere restless zigzag movement, or a wild ideenflucht, or rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen, as Kant would say, would constitute an active as distinguished from an inactive world.
His chief argument to prove the first position laid down by him depended on a double and ambiguous use of the word is; "That which is not, is the non-existent: the word is must, therefore, be applicable to it as truly as when we say That which is, is; therefore, being is predicable of that which is not." So conversely he proved not-being to be predicable of that which is.
Some of these, viz. those connoting some attribute or some set of attributes possessed by one object only, e.g. Sun, God, are really general names, though happening to be predicable only of a single object. But there are also real connotative individual names, part of whose meaning is, that there exists only one individual with the connoted attribute, e.g.
As she now whisked about her room in her bed-gown with an activity not predicable of her age and shape, and finally plunged under the covering and drew it up to her chin with one hand while she pressed it out decorously over her person with the other, she kept up a rapid flow of lamentation and conjecture.
Conscientious exactness is something predicable of the whole moral and intellectual nature, and not of any special faculty; so that, when we find a man using words without any sense of their meaning, and assuming to be familiar with things of which he is wholly ignorant, we are justified in suspecting him of an habitual inaccuracy of mind, which to a greater or less degree disqualifies him both as observer and reporter.
By being 'present in a subject' I do not mean present as parts are present in a whole, but being incapable of existence apart from the said subject. Some things, again, are present in a subject, but are never predicable of a subject. Other things, again, are both predicable of a subject and present in a subject. Thus while knowledge is present in the human mind, it is predicable of grammar.
For if the astronomer has set before us the infinite magnitude of space, and the practical eternity of the duration of the universe; if the physical and chemical philosophers have demonstrated the infinite minuteness of its constituent parts, and the practical eternity of matter and of force; and if both have alike proclaimed the universality of a definite and predicable order and succession of events, the workers in biology have not only accepted all these, but have added more startling theses of their own.
But those who hold the doctrine of ideas, on one side are right, viz. in maintaining their separate existence, if they are to be substances or existences at all. On the other side they are wrong, because by the idea or form which they maintain to be separate they mean the one attribute predicable of many things.
Now you cannot create a man or a woman without knowing whereof a man and a woman are made, though the converse proposition is unfortunately by no means so universally predicable. He was content, as a rule, to put this great science of his into practice rather than to expound it in theory, to demonstrate it rather than to lecture on it, but that is all.
There is, lastly, a class of things which are neither present in a subject nor predicable of a subject, such as the individual man or the individual horse. But, to speak more generally, that which is individual and has the character of a unit is never predicable of a subject. Yet in some cases there is nothing to prevent such being present in a subject.
Word Of The Day