Compendium of the Study of Theology

affection of the mind. Bacon replies that “nothing” must from the point of view of the mind imposing the term be considered as sufficiently real and outside the mind (sufficienter loco reali extra animam quantum ad intellectum imponentem), or, as a modern might put it, that it is real from a logical, if not a metaphysical, point of view ; that it has its own reality in the world of our thoughts, if not in the world of physical things, while the negations in our thoughts do help to express the true nature of the reality outside us. He goes on to note the ambiguity of the statement that “nonentity” (non-ens) can only exist in “the conception and knowledge of the intellect”. The statement may mean that it exists only in the intellect itself, as an accident in a subject, or it may mean that it is a “thing as it is actually conceived and considered”. The statement, he held, is true in the latter sense, not in the former. The assertion is often made at the present day that all Idealism turns upon that ambiguity of the word “conception” which is here exposed by Bacon ; the word may be used to mean either the act of conceiving or the thing conceived. The Idealist is accused of supposing that the things we conceive have no existence outside the mind because our conceptions of them clearly exist only in the mind. Bacon is not here explicitly arguing the metaphysical question of the independent existence of matter, but it is probable that he had some glimpses of the metaphysical problem which lies behind, and is closely connected with, the logical problem as to the “import of propositions,” or “the nature of judgement,” which he is discussing. Bacon would probably have taken the realistic side, and would, perhaps, have sympathized with the above not very intelligent representation of the Idealist’s position.

Chapter III. is “on things connoted and co-intellected by the things on which names are imposed”. Bacon proceeds to show that a name imposed upon a thing outside the mind can signify at the same time other things outside the mind : such things are said in Philosophy to be “co-intellected,” and by the Theologians to be “connoted”. Everything which follows from the thing “by natural and necessary consequence” is