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Updated: May 1, 2025
But still there might be assigned to them what Antipater expressed by the term 'a selective value' or what he expressed by its barbarous privative, 'a disselective disvalue'. If a thing possessed a selective value you took that thing rather than its contrary, supposing that circumstances allowed, for instance, health rather than sickness, wealth rather than poverty, life rather than death.
A painter or dyer who never inquired into their causes hath the ideas of white and black, and other colours, as clearly, perfectly, and distinctly in his understanding, and perhaps more distinctly, than the philosopher who hath busied himself in considering their natures, and thinks he knows how far either of them is, in its cause, positive or privative; and the idea of black is no less positive in his mind than that of white, however the cause of that colour in the external object may be only a privation.
This is the maxim of the Hegelian logic, which starts from the synthesis of Being and Not-being into the Becoming, a very ancient doctrine, long since offered as an explanation of certain phenomena, which I shall now touch upon. A thought and its privative alone that is, a quality and its negative cannot lead to a more comprehensive thought. It is devoid of relation and barren.
The triplicate nature of number, thus alluded to by Pythagoras, springs from the third law of thought, and holds true of all concrete notions. Every such notion stands in necessary relation to its privative, and to the logical concept of next greater extension, i. e., that which includes the notion and its privative, as I explained in the first chapter.
The privative nature of evil, as it is called, is purely a figment of the brain; it is an invention of the schoolmen, which has no corresponding reality in nature. When Adam put forth his hand to pluck the forbidden fruit, and ate it, he committed a sinful act. But why was it sinful? Because he knew it was wrong; because his act was a voluntary and known transgression of the command of God.
Besides these names which stand for ideas, there be other words which men make use of, not to signify any idea, but the want or absence of some ideas, simple or complex, or all ideas together; such as are NIHIL in Latin, and in English, IGNORANCE and BARRENNESS. All which negative or privative words cannot be said properly to belong to, or signify no ideas: for then they would be perfectly insignificant sounds; but they relate to positive ideas, and signify their absence.
The privative can help us nowhere and to nothing; the positive only can assist our reasoning. This elevation of the privative into a contrary, or a contradictory, has been the bane of metaphysical reasoning. From it has arisen the doctrine of the synthesis of an affirmative and a negative into a higher conception, reconciling them both.
I have therefore been well pleased to point out that every purely positive or absolute reality is a perfection, and that every imperfection comes from limitation, that is, from the privative: for to limit is to withhold extension, or the more beyond. Now God is the cause of all perfections, and consequently of all realities, when they are regarded as purely positive.
Its negative or rather privative effect cannot but be bad; if its positive effect is always as good as the works of Mrs. Craik, it will be fortunate. It is difficult, in a book of this kind, to know how far to attempt the subdivisions of specialist novels which have been common, such as for instance the sporting novel, the practitioners of which have been innumerable.
A privative name is equivalent in its signification to a positive and a negative name taken together; being the name of something which has once had a particular attribute, or for some other reason might have been expected to have it, but which has it not.
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