252 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



of a mathematical problem. The word was doubtless 

 extended from one of these objects to another on 

 account of some resemblance between them, or, more 

 probably, between the emotions they excited; but, by 

 this progressive extension, it has at last reached things 

 very remote from those objects of sight to which 

 there is no doubt that it was first appropriated ; and 

 it is at least questionable whether there is now any 

 property common to all the things we call beautiful, 

 except the property of agreeableness, which the term 

 certainly does connote, but which cannot be all that 

 we in any instance intend to express by it, since there 

 are many agreeable things which we never call beau- 

 tiful. If such be the case, it is impossible to give to 

 the word beautiful any fixed connotation, such that it 

 shall denote all the objects which in common use it 

 now denotes, but no others. A fixed connotation, 

 however, it ought to have; for, so long as it has not, 

 it is unfit to be used as a scientific term, and, even as 

 a word in popular use, must be a perpetual source of 

 false analogies and erroneous generalizations. 



This, then, constitutes a case in exemplification of 

 our remark, that even when there is a property 

 common to all the things denoted by a name, to 

 erect that property into the definition and exclusive 

 connotation of the name is not always desirable. 

 The various things called beautiful unquestionably 

 resemble one another in being agreeable ; but to make 

 this the definition of beauty, and so extend the word 

 Beautiful to all agreeable things, would be to drop 

 altogether a portion of meaning which the word really, 

 although indistinctly, conveys, and to do what depends 

 upon us towards causing those qualities of the objects 

 which the word previously, though vaguely, pointed 

 at, to be overlooked and forgotten. It is better, in 



