Secondly, Verbal propositions, which are words, the signs of our
ideas, put together or separated in affirmative or negative sentences.
By which way of affirming or denying, these signs, made by sounds,
are, as it were, put together or separated one from another. So that
proposition consists in joining or separating signs; and truth
consists in the putting together or separating those signs,
according as the things which they stand for agree or disagree.
6. When mental propositions contain real truth, and when verbal.
Every one's experience will satisfy him, that the mind, either by
perceiving, or supposing, the agreement or disagreement of any of
its ideas, does tacitly within itself put them into a kind of
proposition affirmative or negative; which I have endeavoured to
express by the terms putting together and separating. But this
action of the mind, which is so familiar to every thinking and
reasoning man, is easier to be conceived by reflecting on what
passes in us when we affirm or deny, than to be explained by words.
When a man has in his head the idea of two lines, viz. the side and
diagonal of a square, whereof the diagonal is an inch long, he may
have the idea also of the division of that line into a certain
number of equal parts: v.g. into five, ten, a hundred, a thousand,
or any other number, and may have the idea of that inch line being
divisible, or not divisible, into such equal parts, as a certain
number of them will be equal to the sideline.
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