104 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



the same definite particulars. The philosopher, therefore, habitually 

 employs his general names with a definite connotation. But language 

 was not made, and can only in some small degree be mended, by 

 philosophers. In the minds of the real arbiters of language, general 

 names, especially where the classes they denote cannot be brought 

 before the tribunal of the outward senses to be identified and discrim- 

 inated, connote little more than a vague gross resemblance to the 

 things which they were earliest, or have been most, accustomed to call 

 by those names. When, for instance, ordinary persons predicate the 

 words just or unjust of any action, nohle or mean of any sentiment, 

 expressipn, or demeanor, statesman or charlatan of any personage 

 figuring in politics, do they mean to affirm of those various subjects, 

 any determinate attributes, of whatever kind % No ; they merely 

 recognize, as they think, some likeness, more or less vague and loose, 

 between them and some other things which they have been accustomed 

 to denominate or to hear denominated by those appellations. 



Language, as Sir James Mackintosh used to say of governments, 

 " is not made, but gi'ows." A name is not imposed at once and by 

 previous purpose upon a class of objects, but is first applied to one 

 thing, and then extended by a series of transitions to another and 

 another. By this process (as has been remarked by several writers, 

 and illustrated with gi-eat force and clearness by Dugald Stewart, in 

 his Philosophical Essays), a name not unfrequently passes by suc- 

 cessive links of resemblance from one object to another, until it 

 becomes applied to things having nothing in common with the first 

 things to which the name was given ; which, however, do not, for that 

 reason, drop the name ; so that it at last denotes a confused huddle of 

 ebjects, having nothing whatever in common ; and connotes nothing, 

 not even a vague and general resemblance. When a name has fallen 

 into this state, in which by predicating it of any object we assert 

 literally nothing about the object, it has become unfit for the pui-jioses 

 either of thought or of the communication of thought ; and can only 

 be made serviceable by stripping it of some part of its multifarious 

 denotation, and confining it to objects possessed of some attributes in 

 common, which it may be made to connote. Such are the inconve- 

 niences of a language which " is not made, but gi'ows." Like a road 

 which is not made but has made itself, it requires continual mending 

 in order to be passable. 



From this it is already evident, why the question respecting the 

 definition of an abstract name is often one of so much difficulty. The 

 (question. What is justice] is, in other words. What is the attribute 

 which mankind mean to predicate when they call an action just ? To 

 which the first answer is, that having come to no precise agreement on 

 the point, they do not mean to predicate distinctly any attribute at all. 

 Nevertheless, all believe that there is some common attribute belonging 

 to all the actions which they are in the habit of calling just. The 

 question then must be, whether there is any such common attribute 1 

 and, in the first place, whether mankind agree sufficiently with one 

 another as to the particvilar actions which they do or do not call just, 

 to render the inquiry, what quality those actions have in common, a 

 possible one : if so, whether the actions really have any quality in 

 common ; and if they have, what it is. Of these three, the first alono 

 is an inquiry into usage and convention ; the other two ai-e inquiries 



