44 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



tive name taken together; being the name of something which 

 has once had a particular attribute, or for some other reason 

 might have been expected to have it, but which has it not. 

 Such is the word blind, which is not equivalent to not seeing, 

 or to not capable of seeing, for it would not, except by a poetical 

 or rhetorical figure, be applied to stocks and stones. A thing 

 is not usually said to be blind, unless the class to which it is 

 most familiarly referred, or to which it is referred on the par 

 ticular occasion, be chiefly composed of things which can see, 

 as in the case of a blind man, or a blind horse ; or unless it is 

 supposed for any reason that it ought to see ; as in saying of 

 a man, that he rushed blindly into an abyss, or of philosophers 

 or the clergy that the greater part of them are blind guides. 

 The names called privative, therefore, connote two things : the 

 absence of certain attributes, and the presence of others, from, 

 which the presence also of the former might naturally have 

 been expected. 



7. The fifth leading division of names is into relative 

 and absolute, or let us rather say, relative and non-relative ; 

 for the word absolute is put upon much too hard duty in me 

 taphysics, not to be willingly spared when its services can be 

 dispensed with. It resembles the word civil in the language 

 of jurisprudence, which stands for the opposite of criminal, the 

 opposite of ecclesiastical, the opposite of military, the opposite 

 of political in short, the opposite of any positive word which 

 wants a negative. 



Relative names are such as father, son; ruler, subject; 

 like; equal; unlike; unequal; longer, shorter; cause, effect. 

 Their characteristic property is, that they are always given in 

 pairs. Every relative name which is predicated of an object, 

 supposes another object (or objects), of which we may predicate 

 either that same name or another relative name which is said 

 to be the correlative of the former. Thus, when we call any 

 person a son, we suppose other persons who must be called 

 parents. When we call any event a cause, we suppose another 

 event which is an effect. When we say of any distance that 

 it is longer, we suppose another distance which is shorter. 



