228 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



to another on account of a resemblance between them, or 

 more probably, between the emotions they excited ; and, by 

 this progressive extension, it has at last reached things very 

 remote from those objects of sight to which there is no 

 doubt that it was first appropriated ; and it is at least 

 questionable whether there is now any property common to 

 all the things which, consistently with usage, may be called 

 beautiful, except the property of agreeableness, which the 

 term certainly does connote, but which cannot be all that 

 people usually intend to express by it, since there are many 

 agreeable things which are never called beautiful. If such 

 be the case, it is impossible to give to the word Beautiful 

 any fixed connotation, such that it shall denote all the 

 objects which in common use it now denotes, but no others. 

 A fixed connotation, however, it ought to have; for, so 

 long as it has not, it is unfit to be used as a scientific term, 

 and is a perpetual source of false analogies and erroneous 

 generalizations. 



This, then, constitutes a case in exemplification of our 

 remark, that even when there is a property common to all the 

 things denoted by a name, to erect that property into the 

 definition and exclusive connotation of the name is not 

 always desirable. The various things called beautiful un 

 questionably resemble one another in being agreeable ; but 

 to make this the definition of beauty, and so extend the 

 word Beautiful to all agreeable things, would be to drop 

 altogether a portion of meaning which the word really, 

 though indistinctly, conveys, and to do what depends on us 

 towards causing those qualities of the objects which the word 

 previously, though vaguely, pointed at, to be overlooked and 

 forgotten. It is better, in such a case, to give a fixed conno 

 tation to the term by restricting, than by extending its use ; 

 rather excluding from the epithet Beautiful some things to 

 which it is commonly considered applicable, than leaving out 

 of its connotation any of the qualities by which, though 

 occasionally lost sight of, the general mind may have been 

 habitually guided in the commonest and most interesting 

 applications of the term. For there is no question that 



