Matters of fact fall under five headings, and every proposition makes an

assertion or denial corresponding to one of these five divisions: Existence,

Co -existence, Sequence, Causation and Resemblance:

'This fivefold division is an exhaustive classification of matters of

fact: of all things that can be believed, or tendered for belief: of

all questions that can be propounded, and all answers that can be

returned to them'.

'An attribute, therefore, is necessarily either an existence, a co -

existence, a causation, a sequence, or a resemblance'.

We now apply ourselves to the examination of what are termed the 'five

We have already seen the close association between proposition and

names, and we now call attention to the classification of these names:

'As soon as we employ a name to connote attributes, the things, be they

more or fewer, which happen to possess those attributes, are

constituted ipso facto a class'.

The reader will recognize the term 'Dispensational Truth' as a familiar

example of this:

'This portion of the theory of general language is the subject of what

is termed the doctrine of Predicables: a set of distinctions handed

down from Aristotle.  The predicables are a fivefold division of

general names, not grounded as usual on a difference in their meaning,

that is, in the attribute which they connote, but on a difference in

the kind of class which they denote.  We may predicate of a thing five

different varieties of class name:

'A genus of the thing, a species, a differentia, a proporium,

(property) and an accident'.

The above are relative terms, for what may on one occasion be a genus,

may on another be a species.  For example, the word 'animal' is a genus with

respect to the words 'man' or 'John', but a species with respect to the class

of substance or of being.  In logic, the terms genus and species are used in

a more restricted sense than that in which they have been used and

popularized in natural science:

'It was requisite that genus and species should be of the essence of

the subject.  Animal was of the essence of man; biped was not.  And in

every classification they (the logicians) considered some one class as

the lowest species.  Man, for instance, was a lowest species.  Any

further divisions into which the class might be capable of being broken

down, as man into white, black and red man, or into priest and layman,

they did not admit to the species'.

Every predictable expresses either:

The whole essence of its subject, called in logic the species.

Part of its essence called the genus, and difference, or