Prepositions.

  by J. Bentham, August 1814

Of a fabulous object, whether person or thing, the idea (i.e. the image delineated in the mind by the name and accompanying description) may be just the same, whether a corresponding object had or had not been in existence, whether the object were a historical or a fabulous one.

Fictitious entities (viz. the objects for the description of which, throughout the whole course of the present work, the appellative is meant to be employed) are such, of which, in a very ample proportion, the mention, and consequent fiction, require to be introduced for the purpose of discourse ; their names being employed in the same manner as names of substances are employed ; hence the character in which they present themselves is that of so many names of substances. But these names of fictitious entities do not, as do the above-mentioned names of fabulous entities, raise up in the mind any correspondent images.

Follows a sort of commenced catalogue of these fictitious entities, of these names of fictitious entities ; from which the common nature, in which, as above, they all participate, will presently become perceptible. Like the names of real and those of fabulous entities, all these words, it will be seen, are, in the language of grammarians, noun-substantives. All these fictitious entities are, accordingly, so many fictitious substances. The properties which, for the purposes of discourse, are attributed to them, are so many properties of all substances.

That the properties belonging to substances, to bodies in general, are attributed to them—that they are spoken of as if possessed of such properties—appears from the prepositions by which the import of their respective names is put, in connexion with the import of the other words of which the sentence, the grammatical sentence, is composed.

Physical and psychical. Under one or other of these two denominations may all fictitious entities be comprised.

Works, Vol. III, pp. 262-4.
In BENTHAM'S THEORY OF FICTIONS by Charles Kay Ogden,
London, New York : Kegan Paul etc., Harcourt etc., pp. xxxiv-xxxv.

  by J. Bentham

Of no individual substance is any notion commonly entertained without some notion of a place—a relative place as being occupied by it.

The place considered as occupied by an individual substance is different, according to the purpose for which, and the occasion on which, the substance is taken into consideration.

Expressive of the notion of place, in their original, physical, archetypal signification, are the several words termed prepositions of place and adverbs of place. These are—In ; on, or upon ; under ; at ; above ; below ; round ; around ; out, out of ; from above ;from under ; from.

Works, Vol. VIII, pp. 195-199.
In BENTHAM'S THEORY OF FICTIONS by Charles Kay Ogden,
London, New York : Kegan Paul etc., Harcourt etc., p. 20.