A Primer of Psychology

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: as the chair It is a little difficult at first to understand this use of the a, not has. ' i , ut it i important that the use should be seat and ' ' back, etc. understood. To make it clearer we will take an illustration. Suppose we were asked to describe a chair. We might say : " A chair is a piece of furniture that has a seat, and four legs, and bars, and a back, and sometimes arms and rockers." That seems true enough. But if we look at the description closely we find a difficulty. Does the chair ' have' these parts? Is there any chair there if you take the legs and back and seat and arms away ? It is more nearly true to say that the chair is all these things than that it has them. When we speak of the ' legs of a chair,' we do not mean that the chair is complete without its legs ; we ought really to say