168 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



named before the attributes ; as appears from the fact that in 

 all languages, abstract names are mostly compounds or other 

 derivatives of the concrete names which correspond to them. 

 Connotative names, therefore, were, after proper names, the 

 first which were used : and in the simpler cases, no doubt, a 

 distinct connotation was present to the minds of those who 

 first used the name, and was distinctly intended by them to 

 be conveyed by it. The first person who used the word white, 

 as applied to snow or to any other object, knew, no doubt, 

 very well what quality he intended to predicate, and had a 

 perfectly distinct conception in his mind of the attribute sig- 

 nified by the name. 



But where the resemblances and differences on which 

 our classifications are founded are not of this palpable and 

 easily determinable kind ; especially where they consist not 

 in any one quality but in a number of qualities, the effects 

 of which being blended together are not very easily discri- 

 minated, and referred each to its true source ; it often 

 happens that names are applied to nameable objects, with 

 no distinct connotation present to the minds of those who 

 apply them. They are only influenced by a general resem- 

 blance between the new object and all or some of the old 

 familiar objects which they have been accustomed to call by 

 that name. This, as we have seen, is the law which even 

 the mind of the philosopher must follow, in giving names to 

 the simple elementary feelings of our nature : but, where the 

 things to be named are complex wholes, a philosopher is not 

 content with noticing a general resemblance ; he examines 

 what the resemblance consists in : and he only gives the 

 same name to things which resemble one another in the 

 same definite particulars. The philosopher, therefore, habit- 

 ually employs his general names with a definite connotation. 

 But language was not made, and can only in some small 

 degree be mended, by philosophers. In the minds of the 

 real arbiters of language, general names, especially where 

 the classes they denote cannot be brought before the tri- 

 bunal of the outward senses to be identified and discrimi- 

 nated, connote little more than a vague gross resemblance 



