THINGS DENOTED BY NAMES. 33 



when, from being the abstract of the verb to he, it came to denote some- 

 thing sufficiently concrete to be inclosed in a glass bottle. The word 

 Entity, since it settled down into a c<»ncrete name, has retained its 

 universality of signification somewhat less unimpaired than any of the 

 names before mentioned. Yet the same gi'adual decay to which, after 

 a certain age, all the language of psychology seems liable, has been at 

 work even here. If you call virtue an entity, you are indeed somewhat 

 less strongly suspected of believing it to be a substance than if you 

 called it a being ; but you are by no means free from the suspicion. 

 Every word which was originally intended to connote mere existence, 

 seems, after a time, to enlarge its connotation to separate existence, or 

 existence freed from the condition of belonging So a substance; which 

 condition being precisely what constitutes an atti'ibute, attributes are 

 gradually shut out, aTid along with tlann feelings, which, in ninety-nine 

 cases out of a hundred, havt? no other name than that of the attribute 

 which is grounded upon them. Strange that when the greatest em- 

 ban-assment felt by all who have any considerable number of thoughts 

 to express, is to find a sufficient variety of words fitted to express them, 

 there should be no practice to which even philosophers are more ad- 

 dicted than that of taking valuable words to express ideas which are 

 sufficiently expressed by other words already appropriated to them. 



When it is impossible to obtain good tools, the next best thing is to 

 imderstand thoroughly the defects of those we have. I have therefore 

 warned the reader of the ambiguity of the very names which, for want 

 of better, I am necessitated to employ. It must now be the writer's 

 endeavor so to employ them as in no case to leave his meaning doubtful 

 or obscure. No one of the above terms being altogether ambiguous, I 

 shall not confine myself to any one, but shall employ on each occasion 

 the word which seems least likely in the particular case to lead to a 

 misunderstanding of my meaning ; nor do I pretend to use either these 

 or any other words with a rigorous adherence to one single sense. 

 To do so would often leave us without a word to express what is sig- 

 nified by a known word in some one or other of its senses: unless 

 authors had an unlimited license to coin new words, together with 

 (what it would be more difficult to assume) unlimited power of making 

 their readers adopt them. Nor would it be wise in a wi'iter, on a 

 subject involving so much of abstraction, to deny himself the advantage 

 derived from even an improper use of a term, when, by means of it 

 some familiar association is called up which brings the meaning home 

 to the mind, as it were by a flash. 



The difficulty, both to the writer and reader, of the attempt which 

 must be made to use vague words so as to convey a precise meaning, 

 is not wholly a matter of regret. It is not unfitting that logical treatises 

 should affi^rd an example of that, to facilitate which is among the most 

 impoitaiit uses of logic. Philosophical language will for a long time, 

 and popular language pcrhajjs always, retain so much of vagueness 

 and ambiguity, that logic would be of little value if it did not, among 

 its other advantages, exercise the understanding in doing its work 

 neatly and correctly with these imperfect tools. 



After this preamble it is time to proceed to our enumeration. We 

 shall commence with Feelings, the simplest class of nameable things ; 

 the term Feeling being of course understood in its most enlarged 



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