The
difficulty was got over by the invention of the higher category of
somewhat, which should include both body and the bodiless. Time was a
somewhat, and so was space, though neither of them possessed being.
In the Stoic treatment of the proposition, grammar was very much
mixed up with logic. They had a wide name which applied to any part
of diction, whether a word or words, a sentence, or even a syllogism.
This we shall render by "dict." A dict, then, was defined as "that
which subsists in correspondence with a rational phantasy." A dict
was one of the things which the Stoics admitted to be devoid of body.
There were three things involved when anything was said--the sound,
the sense, and the external object. Of these the first and the last
were bodies, but the intermediate one was not a body. This we may
illustrate after Seneca, as follows: "You see Cato walking. What your
eyes see and your mind attends to is a body in motion. Then you say,
'Cato is walking'." The mere sound indeed of these words is air in
motion and therefore a body but the meaning of them is not a body but
an enouncement about a body, which is quite a different thing.
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