Stilpon, however, while rejecting (as Antisthenes had done) the universal Ideas[131] or Forms, took a larger ground of objection. He pronounced them to be inadmissible both as subject and as predicate. If you speak of Man in general (he said), what, or whom, do you mean? You do not mean A or B, or C or D, &c.: that is, you do not mean any one of these more than any other. You have no determinate meaning at all: and beyond this indefinite multitude of individuals, there is nothing that the term can mean. Again, as to predicates — when you say, The man runs, or The man is good, what do you mean by the predicate runs, or is good? You do not mean any thing specially belonging to man: for you apply the same predicates to many other subjects: you say runs, about a horse, a dog, or a cat — you say good in reference to food, medicine, and other things besides. Your predicate, therefore, being applied to many and diverse subjects, belongs not to one of them more than to another: in other words, it belongs to neither: the predication is not admissible.[132]
[131] Hegel (Geschichte der Griech. Philos. i. p. 123) and Marbach (Geschichte der Philos. s. 91) disallow the assertion of Diogenes, that Stilpon ἀνήρει τὰ εἴδη. They maintain that Stilpon rejected the particular affirmations, and allowed only general or universal affirmations. This construction appears to me erroneous.
[132] Diog. L. ii. 113; Plutarch, adv. Kolôten, 1119-1120. εἰ περὶ ἵππου τὸ τρέχειν κατηγοροῦμεν, οὔ φησι (Stilpon) ταὐτὸν εἶναι τῷ περὶ οὖ κατηγορεῖται τὸ κατηγορούμενον — ἐκατέρου γὰρ ἀπαιτούμενοι τὸν λόγον, οὐ τὸν αὐτὸν ἀποδίδομεν ὑπὲρ ἀμφοῖν. Ὅθεν ἁμαρτάνειν τοὺς ἕτερον ἑτέρου κατηγοροῦντας. Εἰ μὲν γὰρ ταὐτον ἐστι τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ τὸ ἀγαθόν, καὶ τῷ ἵππῳ τὸ τρέχειν, πῶς καὶ σιτίου καὶ φαρμάκου τὸ ἀγαθόν; καὶ νὴ Δία πάλιν λέοντος καὶ κυνὸς τὸ τρέχειν, κατηγοροῦμεν; εἰ δ’ ἕτερον, οὐκ ὀρθῶς ἄνθρωπον ἀγαθὸν καὶ ἵππον τρέχειν λέγομεν.
Sextus Empiricus (adv. Mathem. vii. p. 269-282) gives a different vein of reasoning respecting predication, — yet a view which illustrates this doctrine of Antisthenes. Sextus does not require that all predication shall be restricted to identical predication: but he maintains that you cannot define any general word. To define, he says, is to enunciate the essence of that which is defined. But when you define Man — “a mortal, rational animal, capable of reason and knowledge” — you give only certain attributes of Man, which go along with the essence — you do not give the essence itself. If you enumerate even all the accompaniments (συμβεβηκότα), you will still fail to tell me what the essence of Man is: which is what I desire to know, and what you profess to do by your definition. It is useless to enumerate accompaniments, until you explain to me what the essence is which they accompany.
These are ingenious objections, which seem to me quite valid, if you assume the logical subject to be a real, absolute essence, apart from all or any of its predicates. And this is a frequent illusion, favoured even by many logicians. We enunciate the subject first, then the predicate; and because the subject can be conceived after abstraction of this, that, or the other predicates — we are apt to imagine that it may be conceived without all or any of the predicates. But this is an illusion. If you suppress all predicates, the subject or supposed substratum vanishes along with them: just as the Genus vanishes, if you suppress all the different species of it.
“Scais-tu au moins ce que c’est que la matière? Très-bien.… Par exemple, cette pierre est grise, est d’une telle forme, a ses trois dimensions; elle est pésante et divisible. Eh bien (dit le Sirien), cette chose qui te paroît être divisible, pésante, et grise, me dirois tu bien ce que c’est? Tu vois quelques attributs: mais le fond de la chose, le connois tu? Non, dit l’autre. Tu ne scais donc point ce que c’est que la matière.” (Voltaire, Micromégas, c. 7.)
“Le fond de la chose” — the Ding an sich — is nothing but the name itself, divested of every fraction of meaning: it is titulus sine re. But the name being familiar, and having been always used with a meaning, still appears invested with much of the old emotional associations, even though it has been stripped of all its meaning by successive acts of abstraction. If you subtract from four, 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, there will remain zero. But by abstracting, from the subject man, all its predicates, real and possible, you cannot reduce it to zero. The name man always remains, and appears by old association to carry with it some meaning — though the meaning can no longer be defined.
This illusion is well pointed out in a valuable passage of Cabanis (Du Degré de Certitude de la Médecine, p. 61):—
“Je pourrois d’ailleurs demander ce qu’on entend par la nature et les causes premières des maladies. Nous connoissons de leur nature, ce que les faits en manifestent. Nous savons, par exemple, que la fièvre produit tels et tels changements: ou plutôt, c’est par ces changements qu’elle se montre à nos yeux: c’est par eux seuls qu’elle existe pour nous. Quand un homme tousse, crache du sang, respire avec peine, ressent une douleur de côté, a le pouls plus vite et plus dur, la peau plus chaude que dans l’état naturel — l’on dit qu’il est attaqué d’une pleurésie. Mais qu’est ce donc qu’une pleurésie? On vous répliquera que c’est une maladie, dans laquelle tous, ou presque tous, ces accidents se trouvent combinés. S’il en manque un ou plusieurs, ce n’est point la pleurésie, du moins la vraie pleurésie essentielle des écoles. C’est donc le concours de ces accidents qui la constitue. Le mot pleurésie ne fait que les retracer d’une manière plus courte. Ce mot n’est pas un être par lui-même: il exprime une abstraction de l’esprit, et réveille par un seul trait toutes les images d’un assez grand tableau.
“Ainsi lorsque, non content de connoître une maladie par ce qu’elle offre à nos sens, par ce qui seul la constitue, et sans quoi elle n’existeroit pas, vous demandez encore quelle est sa nature en elle-même, quelle est son essence — c’est comme si vous demandiez quelle est la nature ou l’essence d’un mot, d’une pure abstraction. Il n’y a donc pas beaucoup de justesse à dire, d’un air de triomphe, que les médecins ignorent même la nature de la fièvre, et que sans cesse ils agissent dans des circonstances, ou manient des instruments, dont l’essence leur est inconnue.”