DEFINITION. 209 



objects under a common name, though it may be 

 founded only upon a gross and general resemblance, 

 is evidence, in the first place, that the resemblance is 

 obvious, and therefore considerable; and, in the next 

 place, that it is a resemblance which has struck great 

 numbers of persons during a series of years and ages. 

 Even when a name, by successive extensions, has 

 come to be applied to things among which there does 

 not exist even a gross resemblance common to them 

 all, still at every step in its progress we shall find such 

 a resemblance. And these transitions of the mean- 

 ing of words are often an index to real connexions 

 between the things denoted by them, which might 

 otherwise escape the notice even of philosophers ; of 

 those at least who, from using a different language, or 

 from any difference in fheir habitual associations, 

 have fixed their attention in preference upon some 

 other aspect of the things. The history of philosophy 

 abounds in examples of such oversights, which would 

 not have been committed if a philosopher had seen 

 the hidden link that connected together the seemingly 

 disparate meanings of some ambiguous word*, 



* " Few people" (I have said in another place) " have reflected 

 how great a knowledge of Things is required to enable a man to 

 affirm that any given argument turns wholly upon words. There 

 is, perhaps, not one of the leading terms of philosophy which is 

 not used in almost innumerable shades of meaning, to express ideas 

 more or less widely different from one another. Between two of 

 these ideas a sagacious and penetrating mind will discern, as it 

 were intuitively, an unobvious link of connection, upon which, 

 though perhaps unable to give a logical account of it, he will found 

 a perfectly valid argument, which his critic, not having so keen an 

 insight into the Things, will mistake for a fallacy turning on the 

 double meaning of a term. And the greater the genius of him 

 who thus safely leaps over the chasm, the greater will probably be 

 the crowing and vain-glory of the mere logician, who, hobbling 



VOL. I. P 



