REQUISITES OF LANGUAGE. 239 



confused manner, of everything which they have 

 heard or read that civilized men, or civilized commu- 

 nities, are, or should be. 



It is at this stage, probably, in the progress of a 

 concrete name, that the corresponding abstract name 

 generally comes into use. Under the notion that the 

 concrete name must of course convey a meaning, or 

 in other words, that there is some property common 

 to all things which it denotes, men give a name to 

 this common property; from the concrete Civilized, 

 they form the abstract Civilization. But since most 

 people have never compared the different things which 

 are called by the concrete name, in such a manner as 

 to ascertain what properties these things have in 

 common, or whether they have any; each is thrown 

 back upon the marks by which he himself has been 

 accustomed to be guided in his application of the 

 term: and these, being merely vague hearsays and 

 current phrases, are not the same in any two persons, 

 nor in the same person at different times. Hence 

 the word (as Civilization, for example,) which professes 

 to be the designation of the unknown common pro- 

 perty, conveys scarcely to any two minds the same 

 idea. No two persons agree in the things they predi- 

 cate of it ; and when it is itself predicated of anything, 

 no other person knows, nor does the speaker himself 

 know with precision, what he means to assert. Many 

 other words which could be named, as the word 

 honour, or the word gentleman, exemplify this uncer- 

 tainty still more strikingly. 



It needs scarcely be observed, that general propo- 

 sitions of which no one can tell exactly what they 

 assert, cannot possibly have been brought to the test 

 of a correct induction. Whether a name is to be used 

 as an instrument of thinking, or as a means of com- 



