sider those simpler forms which inference presupposes. Here the traditional logic failed completely: it believed that there was only one form of simple proposition (i.e. of proposition not stating a relation between two or more other propositions), namely, the form which ascribes a predicate to a subject. This is the appropriate form in assigning the qualities of a given thing—we may say “this thing is round, and red, and so on.” Grammar favours this form, but philosophically it is so far from universal that it is not even very common. If we say “this thing is bigger than that,” we are not assigning a mere quality of “this,” but a relation of “this” and “that.” We might express the same fact by saying “that thing is smaller than this,” where grammatically the subject is changed. Thus propositions stating that two things have a certain relation have a different form from subject-predicate propositions, and the failure to perceive this difference or to allow for it has been the source of many errors in traditional metaphysics.
The belief or unconscious conviction that all propositions are of the subject-predicate form—in other words, that every fact consists in some thing having some quality—has rendered most philosophers incapable of giving any account of the world of science and daily life. If they had been honestly anxious to give such an account, they would probably have discovered their error very quickly; but most of them were less anxious to understand the world of science and daily life, than to convict it of unreality in the interests of a super-sensible “real” world. Belief in the unreality of the world of sense arises with irresistible force in certain moods—moods which, I imagine, have some simple physiological basis, but are none the less powerfully persuasive. The conviction born of these moods is the source of most
