TERMINOLOGY AND NOMENCLATURE. 491 



and characteristic names, the meaning had been expressed by putting to- 

 gether a number of other names, that particular combination of words al- 

 leady in common use for other purposes would have had nothing to make 

 itself remembered by. If we want to render a particular combination of 

 ideas permanent in the mind, there is nothing which clinches it like r 

 name specially devoted to express it. If mathematicians had been obliged 

 to speak of " that to which a quantity, in increasing or diminishing, is al- 

 ways approaching nearer, so that the difference becomes less than any as- 

 signable quantity, but to which it never becomes exactly equal," instead 

 of expressing all this by the simple phrase, " the limit of a quantity," we 

 should probably have long remained without most of the important truths 

 which have been discovered by means of the relation between quantities of 

 various kinds and their limits. If instead of speaking of momentum, it 

 had been necessary to say, " the product of the number of units of velocity 

 in the velocity by the number of units of mass in the mass," many of the 

 dynamical truths now apprehended by means of this comj)lex idea would 

 probably have escaped notice, for want of recalling the idea itself with 

 sufficient readiness and familiarity. And on subjects less remote from the 

 topics of popular discussion, whoever wishes to draw attention to some 

 new or unfamiliar distinction among things, will find no way so sure as to 

 invent or select suitable names for the express purpose of marking it. 



A volume devoted to explaining what the writer means by civilization, 

 does not raise so vivid a conception of it as the single expression, that Civ- 

 ilization is a diffc rent thing from Cultivation ; the compactness of that 

 brief designation fur the contrasted quality being an equivalent for a long 

 discussion. So, if we would impress forcibly upon the understanding and 

 memory the distinction between the two different conceptions of a repre- 

 sentative government, we can not more effectually do so than by saying 

 that Delegation is not Representation. Hardly any original thoughts on 

 mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind, or assume 

 their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly- 

 selected words or phrases have, as it w^ere, nailed them down and held 

 them fast. 



§ 4. Of the three essential parts of a philosophical language, we have 

 now mentioned two: a terminology suited for describing with precision 

 the individual facts observed ; and a name for every common property of 

 any importance or interest, which we detect by comparing those facts ; in- 

 cluding (as the concretes corresponding to those abstract terms) names for 

 the classes which we artificially construct in virtue of those properties, or 

 as many of them, at least, as we have frequent occasion to predicate any 

 thing of. 



But there is a sort of classes, for the recognition of which no such elab- 

 orate process is necessary ; because each of them is marked out from all 

 others not by some one property, the detection of which may depend on a 

 difficult act of abstraction, but by its properties generally. I mean, the 

 Kinds of things, in the sense which, in this treatise, has been specially at- 

 tached to that term. By a Kind, it will be remembered, we mean one of 

 those classes which are distinguished from all others not by one or a few 

 definite properties, but by an unknown multitude of them ; the combina- 

 tion of properties on which the class is grounded, being a mere index to 

 an indefinite number of other distinctive attributes. The class horse is a 

 Kind, because the things which agree in possessing the characters by which 



