Note Footnote 9: — INTRODUCTION.

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 given9 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".