In the present chapter, certain questions are to be discussed belonging to what may be called philosophical grammar. The study of grammar, in my opinion, is capable of throwing far more light on philosophical questions than is commonly supposed by philosophers. Although a grammatical distinction cannot be uncritically assumed to correspond to a genuine philosophical difference, yet the one is primâ facie evidence of the other, and may often be most usefully employed as a source of discovery. Moreover, it must be admitted, I think, that every word occurring in a sentence must have some meaning: a perfectly meaningless sound could not be employed in the more or less fixed way in which language employs words. The correctness of our philosophical analysis of a proposition may therefore be usefully checked by the exercise of assigning the meaning of each word in the sentence expressing the proposition. On the whole, grammar seems to me to bring us much nearer to a correct logic than the current opinions of philosophers; and in what follows, grammar, though not our master, will yet be taken as our guide^[38].(§ 46 ¶ 1)

Of the parts of speech, three are specially important: substantives, adjectives, and verbs. Among substantives, some are derived from adjectives or verbs, as humanity from human, or sequence from follows. (I am not speaking of an etymological derivation, but of a logical one.) Others, such as proper names, or space, time, and matter, are not derivative, but appear primarily as substantives. What we wish to obtain is a classification, not of words, but of ideas; I shall therefore call adjectives or predicates all notions which are capable of being such, even in a form in which grammar would call them substantives. The fact is, as we shall see, that human and humanity denote precisely the same concept, thse words being employed respectively according to the kind of relation in which this concept stands to the other constituents of a proposition in which it occurs. The distinction which we require is not identical with the grammatical distinction between substantive and adjective, since one single concept may, according to circumstances, be either substantive or adjective: it is the distinction between proper and general names that we require, or rather between the objects indicated by such names. In every proposition, as we saw in Chapter III, we may make an analysis into something asserted and something about which the assertion is made. A proper name, when it occurs in a proposition, is always, at least according to one of the possible ways of analysis (where there are several), the subject that the proposition or some subordinate constituent proposition is about, and not what is said about the subject. Adjectives and verbs, on the other hand, are capable of occurring in propositions in which they cannot be regarded as subject, but only as parts of the assertion. Adjectives are distinguished by capacity for denoting--a term which I intend to use in a technical sense to be discussed in Chapter V. Verbs are distinguished by a special kind of connection, exceedingly hard to define, with truth and falsehood, in virtue of which they distinguish an asserted proposition from an unasserted one, e.g. Caesar died from the death of Caesar. These distinctions must now be amplified, and I shall begin with the distinction between general and proper names.(§ 46 ¶ 2)