REQUISITES OF LANGUAGE. 255 



theorems or practical maxims previously laid down, 

 without having had consciously suggested to us, once 

 in the whole process, the houses and green fields, the 

 thronged market-places and domestic hearths, of 

 which not only those towns and nations consist, but 

 which the words town and nation confessedly mean. 



Since, then, general names come in this manner 

 to be used (and even to do a portion of their work 

 well) without suggesting to the mind the whole of 

 their meaning, and often with the suggestion of a very 

 small, or no part at all of that meaning; we cannot 

 wonder that words so used come in time to be no longer 

 capable of suggesting any other of the ideas appro- 

 priated to them, than those with which the association 

 is most immediate and strongest, or most kept up by 

 the incidents of life : the remainder being lost alto- 

 gether; unless the mind, by often consciously dwelling 

 upon them, keeps up the association. Words natu- 

 rally retain much more of their meaning to persons 

 of active imagination, who habitually represent to 

 themselves things in the concrete, with the detail 

 which belongs to them in the actual world. To minds 

 of a different description, the only antidote to this 

 corruption of language is predication. The habit of 

 predicating of the name, all the various properties 

 which it originally connoted, keeps up the association 

 between the name and those properties. 



Bat in order that it may do so, it is necessary 

 that the predicates should themselves retain their 

 association with the properties which they severally 

 connote. For the propositions cannot keep the 

 meaning of the words alive, if the meaning of the pro- 

 positions themselves should die. And nothing is more 

 common than for propositions to be mechanically 

 repeated, mechanically retained in the memory, and 



