George has blue eyes.
The Earth goes round the Sun.
Two and two make four.
Obviously, in any of these propositions, there is a reference beyond the conceptions in the speaker's mind, viewed merely as incidents in his mental history. They express beliefs about things and the relations among things in rerum natura: when any one understands them and gives his assent to them, he never stops to think of the speaker's state of mind, but of what the words represent. When states of mind are spoken of, as when we say that our ideas are confused, or that a man's conception of duty influences his conduct, those states of mind are viewed as objective facts in the world of realities. Even when we speak of things that have in a sense no reality, as when we say that a centaur is a combination of man and horse, or that centaurs were fabled to live in the vales of Thessaly, it is not the passing state of mind expressed by the speaker as such that we attend to or think of; we pass at once to the objective reference of the words.
Psychologically, then, the theory is sound: what is its logical value? It is sometimes put forward as if it were inconsistent with the Class-reference theory or the theory that judgment consists in a comparison of concepts. Historically the origin of its formal statement is its supposed opposition to those theories. But really it is only a misconception of them that it contradicts. It is inconsistent with the Class-reference view only if by a class we understand an arbitrary subjective collection, not a collection of things on the ground of common attributes. And it is inconsistent with the Conceptualist theory only if by a concept we understand not the objective reference of a general name, but what we have distinguished as a conception or a conceptual image. The theory that the ultimate subject is reality is assumed in both the other theories, rightly understood. If every proposition is the utterance of a judgment, and every proposition implies a general name, and every general name has a meaning or connotation, and every such meaning is an attribute of things and not a mental state, it is implied that the ultimate subject of every proposition is reality. But we may consider whether or not propositions are consistent without considering whether or not they are true, and it is only their mutual consistency that is considered in the syllogistic formulæ. Thus, while it is perfectly correct to say that every proposition expresses either truth or falsehood, or that the characteristic quality of a judgment is to be true or false, it is none the less correct to say that we may temporarily suspend consideration of truth or falsehood, and that this is done in what is commonly known as Formal Logic.
VI. That every proposition may be regarded as expressing relations between phenomena.
Bain follows Mill in treating this as the final import of Predication. But he indicates more accurately the logical value of this view in speaking of it as important for laying out the divisions of Inductive Logic. They differ slightly in their lists of Universal Predicates based upon Import in this sense—Mill's being Resemblance, Coexistence, Simple Sequence, and Causal Sequence, and Bain's being Coexistence, Succession, and Equality or Inequality. But both lay stress upon Coexistence and Succession, and we shall find that the distinctions between Simple Sequence and Causal Sequence, and between Repeated and Occasional Coexistence, are all-important in the Logic of Investigation. But for syllogistic purposes the distinctions have no relevance.