REQUISITES OF LANGUAGE. 231 



keeps up the association between the name and those pro 

 perties. 



But in order that it may do so, it is necessary that the 

 predicates should themselves retain their association with the 

 properties which they severally connote. For the propositions 

 cannot keep the meaning of the words alive, if the meaning 

 of the propositions themselves should die. And nothing is 

 more common than for propositions to be mechanically re 

 peated, mechanically retained in the memory, and their 

 truth undoubtingly assented to and relied on, while yet they 

 carry no meaning distinctly home to the mind ; and while the 

 matter of fact or law of nature which they originally expressed 

 is as much lost sight of, and practically disregarded, as if it 

 never had been heard of at all. In those subjects which are 

 at the same time familiar and complicated, and especially in 

 those which are so in as great a degree as moral and social 

 subjects are, it is a matter of common remark how many impor 

 tant propositions are believed and repeated from habit, while 

 no account could be given, and no sense is practically mani 

 fested, of the truths which they convey. Hence it is, that the 

 traditional maxims of old experience, though seldom ques 

 tioned, have often so little effect on the conduct of life ; 

 because their meaning is never, by most persons, really felt, 

 until personal experience has brought it home. And thus also 

 it is that so many doctrines of religion, ethics, and even 

 politics, so full of meaning and reality to first converts, have 

 manifested (after the association of that meaning with the 

 verbal formulas has ceased to be kept up by the controversies 

 which accompanied their first introduction) a tendency to 

 degenerate rapidly into lifeless dogmas ; which tendency, all 

 the efforts of an education expressly and skilfully directed 

 to keeping the meaning alive, are barely sufficient to counter 

 act. 



Considering, then, that the human mind, in different 

 generations, occupies itself with different things, and in one 

 age is led by the circumstances which surround it to fix more 

 of its attention upon one of the properties of a thing, in 

 another age upon another; it is natural and inevitable that in 



