SPEECH, 169 



connotation of the name is directly given by the etymology of 

 the name ; but this circumstance is immaterial. Whether or 

 not the etymology of a connotative name happens to fit the 

 particular subject to which it is applied, the same kind of 

 classificatory judgment is required for any appropriate appli- 

 cation of the same. If, with Blumenbach, I am accustomed 

 to call a negro an Ethiopian, when I apply this name to any 

 representative of that race, I am performing the same mental 

 act as my neighbour who calls him a Negro, or my child who 

 calls him a Black-man. If it should be said that in all such 

 cases the act of naming is so immediately due to association 

 that no demand is made upon the powers of judgment, the 

 admission would be a dangerous one for my opponents to 

 make, since the same remark would apply to the full proposi- 

 tion, "That man is black." Moreover, the objection admits of 

 being easily disposed of by choosing instances of naming 

 where associations have not yet been definitively fixed. If I 

 am travelling in a strange continent, and amid all the unfamiliar 

 flora there encountered I suddenly perceive a plant which I 

 think I know, before I name it to my friend as that plant, 

 I would submit it to close scrutiny — i.e. carefully judge its 

 resemblances to the known or familiar species. In short, all 

 connotative names, when denominatively applied, betoken 

 acts of judgment, which differ from those concerned in full 

 predication only as regards the form of their expression. Or, 

 as Mill very tersely remarks, " whenever the names given to 

 objects convey any information, that is, whenever they have 

 properly any meaning, the meaning resides not in what they 

 denote, but in what they connote." And although in his 

 elaborate treatment of Names and Propositions he omits ex- 

 pressly to notice the point now before us, it is clearly implied 

 in the above quotation. The point is that connotative names 

 (or denominative terms)* are often in themselves of predicative 

 value ; and this point is clearly implied in the above quotation, 



* Mill, following the schoolmen, uses the terms connotation and denomiiiation 

 as synonymous. For the distinction which I have drawn between them see above, 

 p. 162, 



