36 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



ing of the name, without any extrinsic proof, it is strictly an 

 individual name. 



From the preceding observations it will easily be collected, 

 that whenever the names given to objects convey any in 

 formation, that is, whenever they have properly any meaning, 

 the meaning resides not in what they denote, but in what they 

 connote. The only names of objects which connote nothing 

 are proper names ; and these have, strictly speaking, no signi 

 fication.* 



If, like the robber in the Arabian Nights, we make a mark 

 with chalk on a house to enable us to know it again, the mark 

 has a purpose, but it has not properly any meaning. The 

 chalk does not declare anything about the house ; it does not 

 mean, This is such a person s house, or This is a house which 

 contains booty. The object of making the mark is merely dis 

 tinction. I say to myself, All these houses are so nearly alike 

 that if I lose sight of them I shall not again be able to dis 

 tinguish that which I am now looking at, from any of the 

 others; I must therefore contrive to make the appearance of 

 this one house unlike that of the others, that I may hereafter 

 know, when I see the mark not indeed any attribute of the 

 house but simply that it is the same house which I am now 

 looking at. Morgiana chalked all the other houses in a similar 

 manner, and defeated the scheme : how ? simply by obliterating 

 the difference of appearance between that house and the others. 

 The chalk was still there, but it no longer served the purpose 

 of a distinctive mark. 



When we impose a proper name, we perform an operation 



* A writer who entitles his book Philosophy ; or, the Science of Truth, 

 charges me in his very first page (referring at the foot of it to this passage) 

 with asserting that general names have properly no signification. And he 

 repeats this statement many times in the course of his volume, with comments, 

 not at all flattering, thereon. It is well to be now and then reminded to how 

 great a length perverse misquotation (for, strange as it appears, I do not believe 

 that the writer is dishonest) can sometimes go. It is a warning to readers, 

 when they see an author accused, with volume and page referred to, and the 

 apparent guarantee of inverted commas, of maintaining something more than 

 commonly absurd, not to give implicit credence to the assertion without veri 

 fying the reference. 



