REQUISITES OF LANGUAGE. 227 



scended to modern times from the scholastic ages, that when 

 a word admits of a variety of significations, these different 

 significations must all be species of the same genus, and must 

 consequently include some essential idea common to every 

 individual to which the generic term can be applied:"* for 

 both Aristotle and his followers were well aware that there 

 are such things as ambiguities of language, and delighted 

 in distinguishing them. But they never suspected ambi- 

 guity in the cases where (as Stewart remarks) the association 

 on which the transition of meaning was founded is so 

 natural and habitual, that the two meanings blend together 

 in the mind, and a real transition becomes an apparent 

 generalization. Accordingly they wasted infinite pains in 

 endeavouring to find a definition which would serve for 

 several distinct meanings at once : as in an instance noticed 

 by Stewart himself, that of " causation ; the ambiguity of the 

 word which, in the Greek language, corresponds to the 

 English word cause, having suggested to them the vain 

 attempt of tracing the common idea which, in the case of any 

 effect, belongs to the efficient, to the matter, to the form, and 

 to the end. The idle generalities" (he adds) " we meet with 

 in other philosophers, about the ideas of the good, the fit, and 

 the becoming, have taken their rise from the same undue 

 influence of popular epithets on the speculations of the 

 leamed."t 



Among the words which have undergone so many suc- 

 cessive transitions of meaning that every trace of a property 

 common to all the things they are applied to, or at least 

 common and also peculiar to those things, has been lost, 

 Stewart considers the word Beautiful to be one. And 

 (without attempting to decide a question which in no respect 

 belongs to logic) I cannot but feel, with him, considerable 

 doubt, whether the word beautiful connotes the same pro- 

 perty when we speak of a beautiful colour, a beautiful face, a 

 beautiful scene, a beautiful character, and a beautiful poem. 

 The word was doubtless extended from one of these objects 



* Essays, p. 214. t Ibid. 215. 



152 



