may sensibly perceive therein, you may gain the pleasure of much mystery, but you will lose the benefit of understanding aright the nature of language, and your unverbal knowledge; the oneness which you are seeking sensibly, being only a conception of the intellect.

What we have thus said of the unverbal interpretation of physical units, we may repeat of the unverbal interpretation of intellectual units, as wisdom, wit, imagination, judgment, intellect, truth, knowledge, mind, etc., to the end of the vocabulary of intellectual units. The oneness of each is only intellectually conceived and verbal, while unverbally each unit is as multifarious as its unverbal manifestations; consequently we must segregate the unverbal components of each verbal unit when we would know what its verbal oneness means unverbally. We must practise the like mode of interpretation with every emotional unit, as anger, revenge, jealousy, love, suspicion, vanity, envy, malice, pride, etc., the nominal oneness of each being only a conception of the intellect, while unverbally it is multifarious. Finally, I doubt much if every speculative mystery may not be solved by the foregoing lecture. Ourselves and everything within our consciousness is, in one sense, mysterious; but the peculiar mysteries which perplex our speculations, arise from our misinterpreting nominal units, nominal identities, and verbal homogeneities. Such speculative mysteries all vanish when we interpret verbal homogeneities by their generic unverbal elements, sensible, intellectual, and emotional; and

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when we interpret verbal identities by their unverbal diversities, and nominal units by their unverbal multiplicity. But I fear, notwithstanding I tautologize these eminent truths in various ways, I shall fail to make them intelligible.

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LECTURE VI.

OF THE UNFALLACIOUS INTERPRETATION OF AFFIRMATIVE GENERAL PROPOSITIONS.

CONTENTS.

1. The generality of a proposition is subjective and refers to the intellect; but the objective signification of a proposition is governed by the objects to which it refers.

2. Every general proposition possesses as many different objective significations as it refers to different objects.

§ 1. The propositions of which only I wish to speak either affirm something or deny something; and I shall speak first of affirmative propositions. Twice two are four. Four what? Four anythings to which your intellect may see the proposition is applicable. Every proposition possesses thus two heterogeneous meanings, one general and looking to the intellect, like "twice two are four;" the other particular and looking to the object to which the proposition refers, like twice two apples are four apples. The generality of a proposition is subjective, not objective; hence, general propositions are intellectually what readymade coats are physically that we find in slop shops. Owing to the physical similarity of men, a coat which fits one

man will fit multitudes of men; and owing to the similarity which the intellect sees among objective events and things, the proposition which is intellectually applicable to any objective event or thing, like the foregoing twice two are four, will apply to numerous objective events and things. When, therefore, Pythagoras affirmed that the earth revolves around the sun, we are not compelled to believe that he knew, objectively, what Copernicus subsequently taught thereof, or what the proposition signifies objectively now by means of the developments of Newton. Pythagoras may have meant something intellectually analogous thereto, but which is no part of the existing Newtonian system of the universe. All Pythagoras discovered was the general proposition, "that the earth revolves around the sun." His proposition is an intellectual surtout, which is found to fit many objective bodies that were probably wholly unknown to Pythagoras.

By means, however, of the above objective indefiniteness of subjective general propositions, no modern discovery is announced but some person will show it was known to the ancients; for he will adduce some ancient general proposition that will intellectually fit the modern discovery. Should my Lectures ever gain public attention, many persons will recollect some general proposition of Plato, Socrates, or somebody else, that will intellectually include all that I shall manifest; and in this subjective way alone is the adage true that "nothing is new under the sun." Steam is powerful, dangerous, and useful. This proposition may

have been asserted of steam centuries ago, and the proposition would have referred to objective facts then known, that would have made the proposition objectively significant; but we should mistake were we to suppose that the author of the proposition necessarily knew the modern appliances of steam: he may have known none of them. When Lord Bacon recommended physical investigations, we may see from his Novum Organum, that the recommendation was a subjective intellectual garment whose objective occupants were almost worthless; but we speak of Bacon as though his recommendations possessed the same objective signification to him as they possess to us.

Since the time of Newton, his general proposition of universal gravitation includes many objective facts that were unknown to him. So the late experiments with a pendulum, in the Pantheon at Paris, may give additional objective meaning to the proposition which affirms subjectively the diurnal rotation of the earth; but no proposition can, at any given time, signify objectively more than the known objective facts to which it refers at the time: all its capacity for further objective meaning is in our intellect. I suppose we are speculatively ignorant of this limitation in the objective signification of general propositions, though we know the limitation practically; and hence the interest we evince in physical experiments like the above at Paris. Our ignorance consists in not duly estimating the heterogeneous character of general propositions-not clearly discriminating that their generality is only an intellectual