42 NAMES AND PKOPOSITIONS. 



peculiar way, connoting not the presence but the absence of an attribute. 

 Thus, noPwhite denotes all things whatever except white things ; and con- 

 notes the attribute of not possessing whiteness. For the non-possession of 

 any given attribute is also an attribute, and may receive a name as such ; 

 and thus negative concrete names may obtain negative abstract names to 

 correspond to them.* 



Names which are positive in form are often negative in reality, and oth- 

 ers are really positive though their form is negative. The word inconven- 

 ient, for example, does not express the mere absence of convenience ; it ex- 

 presses a positive attribute — that of being the cause of discomfort or an- 

 noyance. So the word unpleasant, notwithstanding its negative form, does 

 not connote the mere absence of pleasantness, but a less degree of what is 

 signified by the word painful, which, it is hardly necessary to say, is posi- 

 tive. Idle, on the other hand, is a word which, though positive in form, 

 expresses nothing but what would be signified either by the phrase not 

 working, or by the phrase not dis2)0sed to tcork/ and sober, either by not 

 drunk or by not drunken. 



There is a class of names called privative. A privative name is equiva- 

 lent in its signification to a positive and a negative name taken together; 

 being the name of something which has once had a particular attribute, or 

 for some other reason might have been expected to have it, but which has 

 it not. Such is the word blind, which is not equivalent to not seeing, or to 

 not capable of seeing, for it would not, except by a poetical or rlietorical 

 figure, be applied to stocks and stones. A thing is not usually said to be 

 blind, unless the class to which it is most familiarly refen-ed, or to which 

 it is referred on the particular occasion, be chiefly composed of things 

 which can see, as in the case of a blind man, or a blind horse ; or unless it 

 is supposed for any reason that it ought to see ; as in saying of a man, that 

 he rushed blindly into an abyss, or of philosophers or the clergy that the 

 greater part of them are blind guides. The names called privative, there- 

 fore, connote two things ; the absence of certain attributes, and the pres- 

 ence of others, from which the presence also of the former might naturally 

 have been expected. 



§ 7. The fifth leading division of names is into relative and absoltde, or 

 let us rather say, relative and non-relative ; for the word absolute is put 

 upon much too hard duty in metaphysics, not to be willingly spared when 

 its services can be dispensed with. It resembles the word civil in the lan- 

 guage of jurisprudence, which stands for the opposite of criminal, the op- 

 posite of ecclesiastical, the opposite of military, the opposite of political — 

 in short, the opposite of any positive word which wants a negative. 



Relative names are such as father, son ; ruler, subject ; like ; equal ; un- 

 like; unequal; longer, shorter ; cause, effect. Their characteristic property 

 is, that they are always given in pairs. Every relative name which is pred- 

 icated of an object, supposes another object (or objects), of which we may 

 predicate either that same name or another relative name which is said to 

 be the correlative of the former. Thus, when we call any person a son, we 



* Professor Bain {Logic, i., 66) thinks that negative names are not names of all things 

 whatever except those denoted by the correlative positive name, but only for all things of some 

 particular class : not-white, for instance, he deems not to be a name for every thing in natiue 

 except white things, but only for every colored thing other than white. In this case, however, 

 as in all others, the test of what a name denotes is what it can be predicated of: and we can 

 certainly predicate of a sound, or a smell, that it is not white. The affirmation and the nega- 

 tion of the same attribute can not but divide the whole field of predication between them. 



