NAMING. 231 



instruction, the language in which we grow up 

 teaches us all the common philosophy of the age. It 

 directs us to observe and know things which we 

 should have overlooked; it supplies us with classifi- 

 cations ready made, by which things are arranged (as 

 far as the light of by-gone generations admits) with 

 the objects to which they bear the greatest total 

 resemblance. The number of general names in a 

 language, and the degree of generality of those names, 

 afford a test of the knowledge of the era, and of the 

 intellectual insight which is the birthright of any one 

 born into it." 



It is not, however, of the functions of Names, 

 considered generally, that we have here to treat, but 

 only of the manner and degree in which they are 

 directly instrumental to the investigation of truth ; in 

 other words, to the process of induction. 



2. Observation and Abstraction, the operations 

 which formed the subject of the two foregoing chap- 

 ters, are conditions indispensable to induction: there 

 can be no induction where they are not. It has been 

 imagined that Naming is also a condition equally 

 indispensable. There are philosophers who have held 

 that language is not solely, according to a phrase 

 generally current, an instrument of thought, but the 

 instrument: that names, or something equivalent to 

 them, some species of artificial signs, are necessary 

 to reasoning; that there could be no inference, and 

 consequently no induction, without them. But if the 

 nature of reasoning was correctly explained in the 

 earlier part of the present work, this opinion must be 

 held to be an exaggeration, though of an important 

 truth. If reasoning be from particulars to particulars, 

 and if it consist in recognising one fact as a mark of 



