230 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



thought could not take place with anything like the rapidity 

 which we know they possess. Very often, indeed, when we 

 are employing a word in our mental operations, we are so far 

 from waiting until the complex idea which corresponds to the 

 meaning of the word is consciously brought before us in all its 

 parts, that we run on to new trains of ideas by the other asso 

 ciations which the mere word excites, without having realized 

 in our imagination any part whatever of the meaning : thus 

 using the word, and even using it well and accurately, and 

 carrying on important processes of reasoning by means of it, 

 in an almost mechanical manner ; so much so, that some meta 

 physicians, generalizing from an extreme case, have fancied 

 that all reasoning is but the mechanical use of a set of terms 

 according to a certain form. We may discuss and settle the 

 most important interests of towns or nations, by the applica 

 tion of general theorems or practical maxims previously laid 

 down, without having had consciously suggested to us, once 

 in the whole process, the houses and green fields, the thronged 

 market-places and domestic hearths, of which not only those 

 towns and nations consist, but which the words town and nation 

 confessedly mean. 



Since, then, general names come in this manner to be 

 used (and even to do a portion of their work well) without 

 suggesting to the mind the whole of their meaning, and often 

 with the suggestion of a very small, or no part at all of that 

 meaning; we cannot wonder that words so used come in 

 time to be no longer capable of suggesting any other of the 

 ideas appropriated to them, than those with which the asso 

 ciation is most immediate and strongest, or most kept up by 

 the incidents of life: the remainder being lost altogether; 

 unless the mind, by often consciously dwelling on them, keeps 

 up the association. Words naturally retain much more of 

 their meaning to persons of active imagination, who habitually 

 represent to themselves things in the concrete, with the detail 

 which belongs to them in the actual world. To minds of a 

 different description, the only antidote to this corruption of 

 language is predication. The habit of predicating of the 

 name, all the various properties which it originally connoted, 



