common, is another proposition. Logic assumes both: Aristotle assumed
both: but it is the first that is historically the original of all
expressions of the Law of Identity in modern text-books.

Yet another expression of a Law of Identity which is really distinct
from and an addition to Aristotle's original. _Socrates was an
Athenian, a philosopher, an ugly man, an acute dialectician, etc._
Let it be granted that the word Socrates bears the same signification
throughout all these and any number more of predicates, we may still
ask: "But what is it that Socrates signifies?" The title Law of
Identity is sometimes given[9] to a theory on this point. _Socrates is
Socrates._ "An individual is the identity running through the totality
of its attributes." Is this not, it may be asked, to confuse thought
and being, to resolve Socrates into a string of words? No: real
existence is one of the admissible predicates of Socrates: one of
the attributes under which we conceive him. But whether we accept
or reject this "Law of Identity," it is an addition to Aristotle's
dialectical "law of identity"; it is a theory of the metaphysical
nature of the identity signified by a Singular name. And the same may
be said of yet another theory of Identity, that, "An individual is
identical with the totality of its predicates," or (another way
of putting the same theory), "An individual is a conflux of
generalities".

To turn next to the Laws of Contradiction and Excluded Middle. These
also may be subjected to Casuistry, making clearer what they assert by
showing what they do not deny.

They do not deny that things change, and that successive states of the
same thing may pass into one another by imperceptible degrees. A thing
may be neither here nor there: it may be on the passage from here to
there: and, while it is in motion, we may say, with equal truth, that
it is neither here nor there, or that it is both here and there. Youth
passes gradually into age, day into night: a given man or a given
moment may be on the borderland between the two.

Logic does not deny the existence of indeterminate margins: it merely
lays down that for purposes of clear communication and coherent
reasoning the line must be drawn somewhere between _b_, and not-_b_.

A difference, however, must be recognised between logical negation
and the negations of common thought and common speech. The latter are
definite to a degree with which the mere Logic of Consistency