42 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



in this multiplicity of acceptations, distinguishing these so 

 clearly as to prevent their being confounded with one another. 

 Such a word may he considered as two or more names, acci- 

 dentally written and spoken alike.* 



6. The fourth principal division of names, is into posi- 

 tive and negative. Positive, as man, tree, good ; negative, as 

 not-man, not-tree, not-good. To every positive concrete name, 

 a corresponding negative one might he framed. After giving 

 a name to any one thing, or to any plurality of things, we 

 might create a second name which should he a name of all 

 things whatever, except that particular thing or things. These 

 negative names are employed whenever we have occasion 

 to speak collectively of all things other than some thing or 

 class of things. When the positive name is connotative, the 

 corresponding negative name is connotative likewise ; hut in 

 a peculiar way, connoting not the presence but the absence of 

 an attribute. Thus, not-white denotes all things whatever 

 except white things ; and connotes the attribute of not possess- 



* Before quitting the subject of connotative names, it is proper to observe, 

 that the first writer who, in our times, has adopted from the schoolmen the 

 word to connote, Mr. James Mill, in his Analysis of the Phenomena of the 

 Human Mind, employs it in a signification different from that in which it is 

 here used. He uses the word in a sense coextensive with its etymology, apply- 

 ing it to every case in which a name, while pointing directly to one thing, 

 (which is consequently termed its signification,) includes also a tacit reference 

 to some other thing. In the case considered in the text, that of concrete gene- 

 ral names, his language and mine are the converse of one another. Considering 

 (very justly) the signification of the name to lie in the attribute, he speaks of 

 the word as noting the attribute, and connoting the things possessing the attri- 

 bute. And he describes abstract names as being properly concrete names with 

 their connotation dropped : whereas, in my view, it is the denotation which 

 would be said to be dropped, what was previously connoted becoming the whole 

 signification. 



In adopting a phraseology at variance with that which so high an authority, 

 and one which I am less likely than any other person to undervalue, has deli- 

 berately sanctioned, I have been influenced by the urgent necessity for a term 

 exclusively appropriated to express the manner in which a concrete general 

 name serves to mark the attributes which are involved in its signification. This 

 necessity can scarcely be felt in its full force by any one who has not found by 

 experience how vain is the attempt to communicate clear ideas on the philo- 

 sophy of language without such a word. It is hardly an exaggeration to say, 



