NAMES. 23 



indivisible point of time, it becomes applicable only to one individual. 

 And as this appears from the moaning of the name, witliout any 

 extrinsic proof, it is strictly an individual name. 



From the preceding observations it will easily be collected, that 

 whenever the names given to objects convey any information, that is, 

 whenever they have properly Jiny meaning, the meaning resides not 

 in \vhat they denote, but in what they connote. The only names of 

 objects which connote nothing are fro])er names ; and these have, 

 strictly speaking, nO signification. 



If, like the robber in the Arabian Nights, we make a mark with 

 chalk upon a house to enable us to know it again, the mark has a 

 purpose, but it has not pix)perly any meaning. The chalk does not 

 declare anything about the house ; it does not mean, This is such a 

 person's house, or This is a house which contains booty. The object 

 of making the mark is merely distinction. I say to myself. All these 

 houses are so nearly alike, that if I lose sight of them I shall not again 

 be able to distinguish that which I am now looking at from any of 

 the others ; I must therefore contrive to make the appearance of this 

 one house unlike that of the others, that I may hereafter know, when 

 I see the mark — not indeed any attribute of the house — but simply 

 that it is the same house which I am now looking at. Morgiana 

 chalked all the other houses in a similar manner, and defeated the 

 scheme : how ] simply by obliterating the difference of appearance 

 between that house and the others. The chalk was still there, but it 

 no longer served the purpose of a distinctive mark. 



'When we impose a proper name, we perform an operation in some 

 degree analogous to what the robber intended in chalking the house. 

 We put a mark, not indeed upon the object itself, but, if I may so 

 speak, upon the idea of the object. A proper name is but an unmean- 

 ing mark which we connect in our minds with the idea of the object, 

 in order that whenever the mark meets our eyes or occurs to our 

 thoughts, we may think of that individual object. Not being attached 

 to the thing itself, it does not enable us, as the chalk did, to distin- 

 guish the object when we see it; but it enables us to distinguish it 

 when it is spoken of, either in the records of our own experience, or 

 in the discourse of others ; to know that what we find asserted in any 

 proposition of which it is the subject, is asserted of the individual thing 

 with which we were previously acquainted. 



When we predicate of anything its proper name ; when we gay, 

 pointing to a man, this is Brown or Smith, or pointing to a city, that 

 it is York, we do not, merely by so doing, convey to the hearer any 

 information about tliem, except that those are their names. By 

 enabling him to identify the individuals, we may connect them with 

 information previously possessed by him ; by saying, This is York, 

 we may tell him that it contains the Minster. But this is in virtue of 

 what he has previously heard concerning York ; not by anything 

 implied in the name. It is otherwise when objects are spoken of by 

 connotative names. When we say. The town is built of marble, we 

 give the hearer what may be entirely new information, and this merely 

 by the signification of the many-worded connotative name, " built of 

 marble." Such names are not signs of the mere objects, invented 

 because we have occasion to think and speak of those objects individ- 

 ually ; but signs which accorajiany an attribute : a kind of livery in 



