REQUISITES OF LANGUAGE. 251 



both Aristotle and his followers were well aware that 

 there are such things as ambiguities of language, and 

 delighted in distinguishing them. But they never 

 suspected ambiguity in the cases where (as Stewart 

 remarks) the association on which the transition of 

 meaning was founded is so natural and habitual, that 

 the two meanings blend together in the mind, and a 

 real transition becomes an apparent generalization. 

 Accordingly they wasted an infinity of pains in endea- 

 vouring to find a definition which would serve for 

 several distinct meanings at once : as in an instance 

 noticed by Stewart himself, that of " causation; the 

 ambiguity of the word which, in the Greek language, 

 corresponds to the English word cause, having sug- 

 gested to them the vain attempt of tracing the common 

 idea which, in the case of any effect , belongs to the 

 efficient, to the matter, to the form, and to the end. 

 The idle generalities" (he adds) "we meet with in other 

 philosophers, about the ideas of the good, the fit, and 

 the becoming, have taken their rise from the same 

 undue influence of popular epithets on the speculations 

 of the learned*." 



Among words which have undergone so many 

 successive transitions of meaning that every trace of a 

 property common to all the things they are applied to, 

 or at least common and also peculiar to those things, 

 has been lost, Stewart considers the word Beautiful to 

 be one. And (without attempting to decide a ques- 

 tion which in no respect belongs to logic) I cannot 

 but feel, with him, considerable doubt, whether the 

 word beautiful connotes the same property when we 

 speak of a beautiful colour, a beautiful face, a beautiful 

 action, a beautiful character, and a beautiful solution 



Philosophical Essays, p. 215. 



