REQUISITES OF LANGUAGE. 475 



cie7it, to the matter, to the foin^i, and to the end. The idle generalities " 

 (he adds) " we meet with in other philosophers, about the ideas of the good, 

 iha Jit, and the becoming, have taken their rise from the same undue influ- 

 ence of popular epithets on the speculations of the learned."* 



Among the words which have undergone so many successive 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 can 

 not but feel, with him, considerable doubt whether the word beaut'iful con- 

 notes the same property when we speak of a beautiful coloi*, a beautiful 

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

 woi'd was doubtless extended from one of these objects to another on ac- 

 count of a resemblance between them, or, more probably, between the emo- 

 tions they excited ; and, by this progressive extension, it has at last reach- 

 ed things very remote from those objects of sight to which there is no 

 doubt that it was first appropriated ; and it is at least questionable wheth- 

 er there is now any property common to all the things which, consistently 

 Avith usage, may be called beautiful, except the property of agreeablendss, 

 which the term certainly does connote, but which can not be all that people 

 usually intend to express by it, since thei'e are many agreeable things which 

 are never called beautiful. If such be the case, it is impossible to give to 

 the word Beautiful any fixed connotation, such that it shall denote all the 

 objects which in common use it now denotes, but no others. A fixed con- 

 notation, however, it ought to have ; for, so long as it has not, it is unfit to 

 be used as a scientific term, and is a perpetual source of false analogies and 

 erroneous generalizations. 



This, then, constitutes a case in exemplification of our remark, that even 

 when there is a property common to all the things denoted by a name, to 

 erect that property into the definition and exclusive connotation of the name 

 is not always desirable. The various things called beautiful unquestionably 

 resemble one another in being agreeable ; but to make this the definition of 

 beauty, and so extend the word Beautiful to all agreeable things, would be 

 to drop altogether a portion of meaning which the word really, though, in- 

 distinctly, conveys, and to do what depends on us toward causing those 

 qualities of the objects which the word previously, though vaguely, pointed 

 at, to be overlooked and forgotten. It is better, in such a case, to give a 

 fixed connotation to the term by restricting, than by extending its use; 

 rather excluding from the epithet Beautiful some things to which it is com- 

 monly considered applicable, than leaving out of its connotation any of the 

 qualities by which, though occasionally lost sight of, the general mind may 

 have been habitually guided in the commonest and most interesting appli- 

 cations of the term. For there is no question that when people call any 

 thing beautiful, they think they are asserting more than that it is merely 

 agreeable. They think they are ascribing a peculiar sort of agreeableness, 

 analogous to that which they find in some other of the things to which they 

 are accustomed to apply the same name. If, therefore, there be any pe- 

 culiar sort of agreeableness which is common though not to all, yet to the 

 principal things which ax'e called beautiful, it is better to limit the denota- 

 tion of the term to those things, than to leave that kind of quality without 

 a term to connote it, and thereby divert attention from its peculiarities. 



* Ussays, p. 215. 



