CHAPTER III. 



OF NAMING, AS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



1. IT does not belong to the present undertaking to 

 dwell on the importance of language as a medium of human 

 intercourse, whether for purposes of sympathy or of informa 

 tion. Nor does our design admit of more than a passing 

 allusion to that great property of names, on which their func 

 tions as an intellectual instrument are, in reality, ultimately 

 dependent; their potency as a means of forming, and of 

 riveting, associations among our other ideas : a subject on 

 which an able thinker* has thus written : 



Names are impressions of sense, and as such take the 

 strongest hold on the mind, and of all other impressions can 

 be most easily recalled and retained in view. They therefore 

 serve to give a point of attachment to all the more volatile 

 objects of thought and feeling. Impressions that when passed 

 might be dissipated for ever, are, by their connexion with 

 language, always within reach. Thoughts, of themselves, are 

 perpetually slipping out of the field of immediate mental 

 vision ; but the name abides with us, and the utterance of it 

 restores them in a moment. Words are the custodiers of 

 every product of mind less impressive than themselves. All 

 extensions of human knowledge, all new generalizations, are 

 fixed and spread, even unintentionally, by the use of words. 

 The child growing up learns, along with the vocables of his 

 mother-tongue, that things which he would have believed to 

 be different, are, in important points, the same. Without 

 any formal instruction, the language in which we grow up 

 teaches us all the common philosophy of the age. It directs 

 us to observe and know things which we should have over- 



* Professor Bain. 

 VOL. II. 14 



