VARIATIONS IN MEANING OF TERMS. 243 



travellers, and in general those who speak or write concerning 

 moral and social phenomena with which they are not familiarly 

 acquainted, are the great agents in this modification of lan- 

 guage. The vocabulary of all except unusually instructed as 

 well as thinking persons, is, on such subjects, eminently scanty. 

 They have a certain small set of words to which they are accus- 

 tomed, and which they employ to express phenomena the most 

 heterogeneous, because they have never sufficiently analysed 

 the facts to which those words correspond in their own' 

 country, to have attached perfectly definite ideas to the 

 words. The first English conquerors of Bengal, for example, 

 carried with them the phrase landed proprietor into a country 

 where the rights of individuals over the soil were extremely 

 different in degree, and even in nature, from those recognised 

 in England. Applying the term with all its English 

 associations in such a state of things ; to one who had only a 

 limited right they gave an absolute right, from another 

 because he had not an absolute right they took away all right, 

 drove whole classes of people to ruin and despair, filled the 

 country with banditti, created a feeling that nothing was 

 secure, and produced, with the best intentions, a disorganiza- 

 tion of society which had not been produced in that country 

 by the most ruthless of its barbarian invaders. Yet the 

 usage of persons capable of so gross a misapprehension, deter- 

 mines the meaning of language; and the words they thus 

 misuse grow in generality, until the instructed are obliged to 

 acquiesce ; and to employ those words (first freeing them from 

 vagueness by giving them a definite connotation) as generic 

 terms, subdividing the genera into species. 



4. While the more rapid growth of ideas than of names 

 thus creates a perpetual necessity for making the same names- 

 serve, even if imperfectly, on a greater number of occasions ; a 

 counter-operation is going on, by which names become on 

 the contrary restricted to fewer occasions, by taking on, as it 

 were, additional connotation, from circumstances not origi- 

 nally included in the meaning, but which have become con- 

 nected with it in the mind by some accidental cause. We 



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