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Updated: May 2, 2025
Almost all metaphysicians prior to Locke, as well as many since his time, have made a great mystery of Essential Predication, and of predicates which were said to be of the essence of the subject. The essence of a thing, they said, was that without which the thing could neither be, nor be conceived to be.
Words naturally retain much more of their meaning to persons of active imagination, who habitually represent to themselves things in the concrete, with the detail which belongs to them in the actual world. To minds of a different description, the only antidote to this corruption of language is predication.
This last admission cannot be made in stronger terms than it is by Hobbes himself; though he will not allow such erroneous belief to be called falsity, but only error. And he has himself laid down, in other places, doctrines in which the true theory of predication is by implication contained.
But, of classification as resulting from, and implied in, the fact of employing general language, we cannot forbear to treat here, without leaving the theory of general names, and of their employment in predication, mutilated and formless.
Although Hobbes’ theory of Predication has not, in the terms in which he stated it, met with a very favourable reception from subsequent thinkers, a theory virtually identical with it, and not by any means so perspicuously expressed, may almost be said to have taken the rank of an established opinion.
He might claim for his largest atom the same quality of substance as for his smallest, but so long as he conceived that the large atoms, when adjusted together to form a tangible substance, formed a substance different in quality from the substance which the small atoms would make up when similarly grouped, this concession amounts to the predication of difference of quality between the atoms themselves.
Form and matter, final and efficient causes, potential and actual existences, substance, accident, difference, genus, species, predication, syllogism, deduction, induction, analogy, and multitudes of other joints in the machinery of thought for all time, were forged for us in the workshop of Aristotle.
Therefore the circumstance of time is properly considered as attaching to the copula, which is the sign of predication, and not to the predicate.
To it goodness cannot be ascribed; indeed no predicate can be properly applied to it, for any predication implies relation: in earlier language than Mr Bradley's it involves determination and therefore negation. Even to say that the Absolute appears or manifests itself is to predicate something, to imply relation, and thus is an offence against the absoluteness of the Absolute.
A predicate and a subject are all that is necessarily required to make up a proposition: but as we can not conclude from merely seeing two names put together, that they are a predicate and a subject, that is, that one of them is intended to be affirmed or denied of the other, it is necessary that there should be some mode or form of indicating that such is the intention; some sign to distinguish a predication from any other kind of discourse.
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