point often lies in what is
unexpressed. Thus, "barbarous nations make, the civilised write
history," means that civilised nations do not make history, which none
is so brazen as openly to assert. Or, again, "Alcibiades is dead, but X
is still with us"; the whole meaning of this 'exponible' is that X would
be the lesser loss to society. Even an epithet or a suffix may imply a
proposition: _This personage_ may mean _X is a pretentious nobody_.

How shall we interpret such illusive predications except by cultivating
our literary perceptions, by reading the most significant authors until
we are at home with them? But, no doubt, to disentangle the compound
propositions, and to expand the abbreviations of literature and
conversation, is a useful logical exercise. And if it seem a laborious
task thus to reduce to its logical elements a long argument in a speech
or treatise, it should be observed that, as a rule, in a long discourse
only a few sentences are of principal importance to the reasoning, the
rest being explanatory or illustrative digression, and that a close
scrutiny of these cardinal sentences will frequently dispense us from
giving much attention to the rest.

Sec. 4. But now, returning to the definition of a Proposition given in Sec. 2,
that it is 'a sentence in which one term is predicated of another,' we
must consider what is the import of such predication. For the
definition, as it stands, seems to be purely Nominalist. Is a
proposition nothing more than a certain synthesis of words; or, is it
meant to correspond with something further, a synthesis of ideas, or a
relation of facts?

Conceptualist logicians, who speak of judgments instead of
propositions, of course define the judgment in their own language.
According to Hamilton, it is "a recognition of the relation of
congruence or confliction in which two concepts stand to each other." To
lighten the sentence, I have omitted one or two qualifications
(Hamilton's _Lectures on Logic_, xiii.). "Thus," he goes on "if we
compare the thoughts _water_, _iron_, and _rusting_, we find them
congruent, and connect them into a single thought, thus: _water rusts
iron_--in that case we form a judgment." When a judgment is expressed in
words, he says, it is called a proposition.

But has a proposition no meaning beyond the judgment it expresses? Mill,
who defines it as "a portion of discourse in which a predicate is
affirmed or denied of a subject" (_Logic_, Book 1., ch