NAMES. 53 



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 disposed to work; and sober, either by not 

 drunk or by not drunken. 



There is a class of names called privative. A 

 privative name is equivalent in its signification to a 

 positive and a negative name taken together ; being 

 the name of something which has once had a par- 

 ticular 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 rhetorical 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 referred, 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, 

 therefore, connote two things : the absence of certain 

 attributes, and the presence 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 absolute, 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 language of juris- 

 prudence, which stands for the opposite of criminal, 



