64 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



condition of belonging to a substance ; which con- 

 dition being precisely what constitutes an attribute, 

 attributes are gradually shut out, and along with them 

 feelings, which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, 

 have no other name than that of the attribute which 

 is grounded upon them. Strange that when the 

 greatest embarrassment felt by all who have any con- 

 siderable number of thoughts to express, is to find a 

 sufficient variety of words fitted to express them, 

 there should be no practice to which even philoso- 

 phers are more addicted than that of taking valuable 

 words to express ideas which are sufficiently expressed 

 by other words already appropriated to them. 



When it is impossible to obtain good tools, the 

 next best thing is to understand thoroughly the defects 

 of those we have. I have therefore warned the reader 

 of the ambiguity of the very names which, for want of 

 better, I am necessitated to employ. It must now be 

 the writer's endeavour so to employ them as in no 

 case to leave his meaning doubtful or obscure. No 

 one of the above terms being altogether ambiguous, T 

 shall not confine myself to any one, but shall employ 

 on each occasion the word which seems least likely in 

 the particular case to lead to a misunderstanding of 

 my meaning ; nor do I pretend to use either these or 

 any other words with a rigorous adherence to one 

 single sense. To do so would often leave us without 

 a word to express what is signified by a known word 

 in some one or other of its senses : unless authors had 

 an unlimited license to coin new words, together with 

 (what it would be more difficult to assume) unlimited 

 power of making their readers adopt them. Nor 

 would it be wise in a writer, on a subject involving so 

 much of abstraction, to deny himself the advantage 

 derived from even an improper use of a term, when, 



