Let us take, as another case, that in which the subject and predicate of my intended proposition are, the word "I" and "reading." I want for the purpose of predication only a _Copula_ to signify nakedly that the mark "reading" is applied to the mark "I;" but instead of this I am obliged to use a word which connotes EXISTENCE, along with the force of the _Copula_; and when I say "I am reading," not only _reading_ is predicated of me, but EXISTING also. Suppose, again, my subject is "John," my predicate "dead," I am obliged to use for my _Copula_ the word "is," which connotes EXISTENCE, and I thus predicate of John both _existence_ and _death_.
It may be easily collected, from this one example, what heterogeneous and inconsistent ideas may be forced into connection by the use of the Substantive Verb as the _Copula_ in Predication; and what confusion in the mental processes it tends to produce. It is in the case, however, of the higher abstractions, and the various combinations of ideas which the mind, in the processes of enquiring and marking, forms for its own convenience, to obtain a greater command over its stores and greater facility in communicating them, that the use of the verb which conjoins the Predication of EXISTENCE with every other Predication, has produced the wildest confusion, and been the most deeply injurious. Is it any wonder, for example, that _Chance_, and _Fate_, and _Nature_, have been personified, and have had an EXISTENCE ascribed { 176} to them, as objects, when we have no means of predicating anything whatsoever of them, without predicating such EXISTENCE at the same time. If we say that "chance is nothing;" we predicate of it, by the word "is," both _existence_ and _nothingness_.
When this is the case, it is by no means to be wondered at, that philosophers should so long have inquired what those EXISTENCES are which abstract terms were employed to express; and should have lost themselves in fruitless speculations about the nature of entity, and quiddity, substance, and quality, space, time, necessity, eternity, and so on.
It is necessary here to take notice of a part of the marking power of Verbs, which could not be explained till the nature of the _copula_ was understood.
