118 ■ NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



semble one another in the same definite particulars. The philosopher, 

 therefore, habitually employs his general names with a definite connota- 

 tion. 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 can not be brought 

 before the tribunal of the outward senses to be identified and discriminated, 

 connote little more than a vague gross resemblance to the things which 

 they were earliest, or have been most, accustomed to call by those names. 

 When, for instance, ordinary pei'sons predicate the words just or unjust 

 of any action, nohle or mean of any sentiment, expression, or demeanor, 

 statesman or charlatan of any personage figuring in politics, do they mean 

 to afiirm of those various subjects any determinate attributes, of whatever 

 kind ? No : they merely recognize, 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 denominated by those ap- 

 pellations. 



Language, as Sir James Mackintosh used to say of governments, " is not 

 made, but grows." A name is not imposed at once and by previous pur- 

 pose upon a class of objects, but is first applied to one thing, and then ex- 

 tended 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 cleai-ness 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 applied to things having nothing in common with 

 the first things to w^hich the name was given ; which, however, do not, for 

 that reason, drop the name ; so that it at last denotes a confused huddle of 

 objects, having nothing whatever in common ; and connotes nothing, not 

 even a vague and general resemblance. 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 pui'poses either of thought or 

 of the communication of thought; and can only be made serviceable by 

 stripping it of some part of its multifarious 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 con- 

 tinual mending in order to be passable. 



From this it is already evident, why the qiiestion respecting the defini- 

 tion of an abstract name is often one of so much difficulty. The question, 

 What is justice? is, in other words. What is the attribute which mankind 

 mean to predicate when they call an action just? To which the first an- 

 swer is, that having come to no precise agreement on the point, they do 

 not mean to predicate distinctly any attribute at all. Nevertheless, all be- 

 lieve that there is some common attribute belonging to all the actions Avhich 

 they are in the habit of calling just. The question then must be, whether 

 there is any such common attribute ? and, in the first place, whether man- 

 kind agree sufficiently with one another as to the particular actions which 

 they do or do not call just, to render the inquiry, what quality those ac- 

 tions have in common, a possible one : if so, whether the actions really have 

 any quality in common ; and if they have, what it is. Of these three, the 

 first alone is an inquiry into usage and convention ; the other two are inqui- 

 ries into matters of fact. And if the second question (whether the actions 

 form a class at all) has been answered negatively, there remains a fourth, 



