DEFINITION. 



169 



to the things which they were earliest, or have been most, 

 accustomed to call by those names. When, for instance, 

 ordinary persons predicate the words just or unjust of any 

 action, noble or mean of any sentiment, expression, or 

 demeanour, statesman or charlatan of any personage figuring 

 in politics, do they mean to affirm of those various subjects 

 any determinate attributes, of whatever kind? No: they 

 merely recognise, as they think, some likeness, more or less 

 vague and loose, between these and some other things which 

 they have been accustomed to denominate or to hear deno- 

 minated by those appellations. 



Language, as Sir James Mackintosh used to say of govern- 

 ments, " is not made, but grows." A name is not imposed at 

 once and by previous purpose upon a class of objects, but is 

 first applied to one thing, and then extended by a series of 

 transitions to another and another. By this process (as has 

 been remarked by several writers, and illustrated with great 

 force and clearness by Dugald Stewart in his Philosophical 

 Essays) a name not unfrequently passes by successive links of 

 resemblance from one object to another, until it becomes ap- 

 plied to things having nothing in common with the first things 

 to which the name was given ; which, however, do not, for 

 that reason, drop the name; so that it at last denotes a con- 

 fused huddle of objects, having nothing whatever in common ; 

 and connotes nothing, not even a vague and general resem- 

 blance. When a name has fallen into this state, in which by 

 predicating it of any object we assert literally nothing about 

 the object, it has become unfit for the purposes either of 

 thought or of the communication of thought ; and can only 

 be made serviceable by stripping it of some part of its multi- 

 farious denotation, and confining it to objects possessed of 

 some attributes in common, which it may be made to connote. 

 Such are the inconveniences of a language which " is not made, 

 but grows." Like the governments which are in a similar 

 case, it may be compared to a road which is not made but has 

 made itself: it requires continual mending in order to be 

 passable. 



From this it is already evident, why the question respect- 



