But, in fact, to find the logical force of recognised grammatical forms
is the least of a logician's difficulties in bringing the discourses of
men to a plain issue. Metaphors, epigrams, innuendoes and other figures
of speech present far greater obstacles to a lucid reduction whether for
approval or refutation. No rules can be given for finding everybody's
meaning. The poets have their own way of expressing themselves;
sophists, too, have their own way. And the point often lies in what is
unexpressed. Thus, "barbarous nations make, the civilised write
history," means that civilised nations do not make history, which none
is so brazen as openly to assert. Or, again, "Alcibiades is dead, but X
is still with us"; the whole meaning of this 'exponible' is that X would
be the lesser loss to society. Even an epithet or a suffix may imply a
proposition: _This personage_ may mean _X is a pretentious nobody_.

How shall we interpret such illusive predications except by cultivating
our literary perceptions, by reading the most significant authors until
we are at home with them? But, no doubt, to disentangle the compound
propositions, and to expand the abbreviations of literature and
conversation, is a useful logical exercise. And if it seem a laborious
task thus to reduce to its logical elements a long argument in a speech
or treatise, it should be observed that, as a rule, in a long discourse
only a few sentences are of principal importance to the reasoning, the
rest being explanatory or illustrative digression, and that a close
scrutiny of these cardinal sentences will frequently dispense us from
giving much attention to the rest.

§ 4. But now, returning to the definition of a Proposition given in § 2,
that it is 'a sentence in which one term is predicated of another,' we
must consider what is the import of such predication. For the
definition, as it stands, seems to be purely Nominalist. Is a