230 



CHAPTER III. 

 OF NAMING, AS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



1 . IT does not belong to the present undertaking 

 to dwell on the importance of language as a medium 

 of human intercourse, whether for purposes of sym- 

 pathy or information. Nor does our design admit of 

 more than a passing allusion to that great property of 

 names, upon which their functions as an intellectual 

 instrument are, in reality, ultimately dependent ; their 

 potency as a means of forming, and of rivetting, asso- 

 ciations among our other ideas: a subject on which 

 an able thinker has thus written: 



" Names are impressions of sense, and as such 

 take the strongest hold on the mind, and of all other 

 impressions can be most easily recalled and retained 

 in view. They therefore serve to give a point of 

 attachment to all the more volatile objects of thought 

 and feeling. Impressions, that when past might be 

 dissipated for ever, are, by their connexion with 

 language, always within reach. Thoughts, of them- 

 selves, are perpetually slipping out of the field of 

 immediate mental vision ; but the name abides with 

 us, and the utterance of it restores them in a mo- 

 ment. Words are the custodiers of every product 

 of mind less impressive than themselves. All exten- 

 sions of human knowledge, all new generalizations, 

 are fixed and spread, even unintentionally, by the 

 use of words. The child growing up learns, along 

 with the vocables of his mother- tongue, that things 

 which he would have believed to be different, are, in 

 important points, the same. Without any formal 



