DEFINITION. 205 



" What is justice ?" that of the Republic. Such, also, 

 is the question scornfully asked by Pilate, " What is 

 truth?" and the fundamental question with speculative 

 moralists in all ages, " What is virtue?" 



It would be a mistake to represent these difficult 

 and noble inquiries as having nothing in view beyond 

 ascertaining the conventional meaning of a name. 

 They are inquiries not so much to determine what is, 

 as what should be, the meaning of a name; which, like 

 other practical questions of terminology, requires for 

 its solution that we should enter, and sometimes enter 

 very deeply, into the properties not merely of names 

 but of the things named. 



Although the meaning of every concrete general 

 name resides in the attributes which it connotes, the 

 objects were named before the attributes ; as appears 

 from the fact that in all languages, abstract names are 

 mostly compounds or derivatives of the concrete 

 names which correspond to them. Connotative 

 names, therefore, were, after proper names,, the first 

 which were used : and in the simpler cases, no doubt, 

 a distinct connotation was present to the minds of 

 those who first used the name, and was distinctly 

 intended by them to be conveyed by it. The first 

 person who used the word white, as applied to snow 

 or to any other object, knew, no doubt, very well what 

 quality he intended to predicate, and had a perfectly 

 distinct conception in his mind of the attribute sig- 

 nified by the name. 



But where the resemblances and differences on 

 which our classifications are founded are not of this 

 palpable and easily determinable kind ; especially where 

 they consist not in any one quality but in a number 

 of qualities, the effects of which being blended toge- 

 ther are not very easily discriminated and referred 



