AN

OUTLINE

OF

SEMATOLOGY;

OR

AN ESSAY

TOWARDS ESTABLISHING A

NEW THEORY

OF

GRAMMAR, LOGIC, AND RHETORIC.

"PERHAPS if words were distinctly weighed and duly considered, they
would afford us another sort of Logic and Cretic, than what we have been
hitherto acquainted with."-LOCKE.

LONDON:

JOHN RICHARDSON, ROYAL EXCHANGE.

1831.

G WOODFALL, ANGEL COURT, SKINNER STREET, LONDON,

ADVERTISEMENT.

I PUT not my name to these pages, nor shall I, beyond this notice, speak in the first person singular, but assume the pomp and circumstance of the editorial "we". Why I choose for the present to remain unknown, I leave the reader to settle as his fancy pleases. He is at liberty to think that, being of no note or reputation, and fearing for my book the fate of George Primrose's Paradoxes, I do not place my name in the title page, because it would inevitably make that fate more certain. Or, if he chooses, he may imagine a better motive. He may suppose me to be the celebrated author of ** ****, with half the alphabet in capitals at the end of my and that I prefer an incognito, lest he, my "courteous reader", should relax the rigour of examination, and receive as true, on the authority of a name, a theory that may be false.

AN

OUTLINE OF SEMATOLOGY.

INTRODUCTION.

In the last chapter of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, there is a threefold division of knowledge into φυσικὴ, πρακτικὴ, and σημειωτική. If we might call the whole body of instruction which acquaints us with Tà quoixà by the name Physicology, and τὰ φυσικὰ that which teaches тà TракTIкà by the name Practicology,-all instruction for the use of Tà onμara, or the signs of our knowledge, might be called SEMATOLOGY *.

*

Physicology, far more comprehensive than the sense to which Physiology is fixed, would in this case signify the doctrine of the nature of all things whatever which exist independently of the mind's conception of them, and of the human will; which things include all whose nature we grow acquainted with by experience, and can know in no other way, and therefore include the mind, and God; since of the mind as well as of sensible things we know the nature only by experience, and since, abstracted from Revelation, we know the existence of a God only by experiencing His providence. Practicology, the next division, is the doctrine of human actions determined by the will to a preconceived end, namely, something beneficial to individuals, or to communities, or the welfare of the

B