408 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



live method thaii is elsewhere to be found among the ancients', and are, 

 indeed, ahnost jjerfect examples of the preparatory process of com- 

 parison and abstraction ; but, from being unaware of the law just 

 mentioned, he wasted the powers of this great logical instrument upon 

 inquiries in which it cbuld realize no result, since the phenomena 

 whose common properties he so elaborately endeavored to detect, had 

 not really any common properties. Bacon himself fell into the same 

 eiTor in his speculations on the nature of Heat, in which it is impossi- 

 ble not to think, with Mr. Whewell, that he confounded under the 

 name hot, classes of phenomena which had no property in common.* 

 Dugald Stewart certainly overstates the matter when he speaks of "a 

 prejudice which has descended to modern times from the scholastic 

 ages, that when a word admits of a vai'iety of significations, these 

 different significations must all be species of the same genus, and 

 must consequently include some essential idea common to every indi- 

 vidual to which the generic term can be apphed:"t for both Aristotle 

 and his followers were well aware that there are such things as am- 

 biguities of language, and delighted in distinguishing them. But they 

 never suspected ambiguity in the cases where (as Stewart remarks) 

 the association on which the transition of meaning was founded is so 

 natural and habitual, that the two meanings blend together in the mind, 

 and a real transition becomes an apparent generalization. Accordingly 

 they wasted an infinity of pains in endeavoring to find a definition 

 which would serve for sevei-al distinct meanings at once : as in an in- 

 stance noticed by Stewart himself, that of " causation ; the ambiguity 

 of the word which, in the Greek language, coiTesponds to the English 

 word cause, having suggested to them the vain attempt of tracing the 

 common idea which, in the case of any effect, belongs to the efficient, 

 to the matter, to the form, and to the end. The idle generalities" (he 

 adds) " we meet with in other philosophers, about the ideas of the good, 

 the jit, and the becoming, have taken their rise from the same undue 

 influence of popular epithets on the speculations of the learned. "| 



Among words which have undergone so many successive transitions 

 of meaning that every trace of a property common to all the things 

 they are applied to, or at least common and also peculiar to those 

 things, has been lost, Stewart considei's the word Beautiful to be one. 

 And (without attempting to decide a question which in no respect 

 belongs to logic) I cannot but feel, with him, considerable doubt, 

 whether the word beautiful coimotes the same property when we 

 speak of a beautiful color, a beautiful face, a beautiful action, a beauti- 

 ful character, and a beautiful solution of a mathematical problem. The 

 word was doubtless extended from one of these objects to another on 

 account of some resemblance be4;ween them, or, more probably, 

 between the emotions they excited ; but, by this progi-essive 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 beautiful. If such be' the case, it is 



* History of the Inductive Sciences, i., 48. 



t Philosophical Essays, p. 214. t Ibid, p. 215. 



