Page:Aristotle (Grant).djvu/65

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
THE BOOK ‘ON INTERPRETATION’.
55

the “proposition,”—that is to say, it treats of sentences which affirm or deny something. Modern Logic is divided into three parts, treating respectively of terms, propositions, and syllogisms; and it might for a moment be supposed that the three works, ‘Categories,’ ‘On Interpretation,’ and ‘Analytics,’ correspond to these three divisions. But this is only superficially the case; for the ‘Categories’ does not treat generally of simple terms, it only touches on some characteristics of the names of Substances, Qualities, Quantities, and Relations. And the book, ‘On Interpretation’ is not a prelude to the ‘Analytics;’ it is a separate logical monograph on some of the characteristics of propositions, containing, at the same time, some remarks on words, as fit or unfit to become terms — on indefinite words, “syn-categorematic” words, &c. The great merit of this little treatise is undeniable, especially when considered as containing matter, which though now long accepted and perfectly trite, was in a great measure new in the time of Aristotle, and which served towards the clearing up of many a confusion. All those clear statements about the nature of the proposition; on what is meant by “contrariety” and “contradiction;” on “modal propositions,” or propositions in which the amount of certainty is expressed by the words “necessarily” or “probably;” and other points which the reader will find in the second part of Whately’s ‘Logic,’ are taken almost verbatim from this treatise. There is one point of which Whately was especially fond—namely, that “truth” is the attribute of a proposition or assertion and of nothing else, except in a metaphori-