416 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



residence, was soon disregarded in the employment of the word. As 

 there was seldom any occasion for making separate assertion respect- 

 ing heathens who lived in the country, there was no need for a separate 

 W£>rd to denote them ; and pagan came not only to mean heathen, but 

 to mean that exclusively. . ^ " ■ '. 



"A case still more familiar to most readers is that of the -wovA villain, 

 or villein. This term, as everybody knows, had in the middle ages a 

 connotation as strictly defined as a word could have, being the proper 

 legal designation for those persons who were the subjects of the least 

 onerous form of feudal bondage, those serfs who were adscripti glehce. 

 The scorn of the semibarbarous military aristocracy for these their ab- 

 ject dependents, rendered the act of likening any person to this class 

 of men a mark of the greatest contumely: the same scorn led them to 

 ascribe to the' same people all manner of hateful qualities, which doubt- 

 less also, in the degrading situation in which they were held, were often 

 not unjustly imputed to them. These circumstances combined to 

 attach to the term villain, ideas of crime and guilt, in so forcible a 

 manner, that the application of the epithet, even to those to whom it 

 legally belonged, became an affront, and was abstained from whenever 

 no affront was intended; From that time guilt was part of the conno- 

 tation ; and^soon became the whole of it, since mankind were not 

 prompted by any urgent motive to continue making a distinction in 

 their language between bad men of sei^vile station and bad men of any 

 other rank in life. 



These and similar instances in which the original signification of a 

 term is totally lost — another arid an entirely distinct meaning being 

 first engrafted upon the former, and finally substituted for it — afford 

 examples of the double movement which is always taking place in lan- 

 guage ; the counter-movements, one of Generalization, by which words 

 are perpetually losing portions of their connotation and becoming of 

 less meaning and more general acceptation ; the other of Specialization, 

 by which other, or even these same words, are continually taking on 

 fresh connotation ; acquiring additional meaning, by being restricted in 

 their employmentto a part only of the occasions on which they might 

 projjerly be used before. This double movement is of sufficient im- 

 portance m the natural history of language (to which natural history, 

 the artificial modifications ought always to have some degree of refer- 

 ence), to justify our dwelling for a little longer on the nature of the 

 two-fold phenomenon, and the causes to which it owes its -existence; 



^ 3. To begin with the movement of generalization. It is unneces- 

 sary to dwell upon the changes in the meaning of names which take 

 place merely from their being used ignorantly, by persons who, not 

 having properly mastered the received connotation of a word, apply it 

 in a looser and wider sense than belongs to it. This, however, is a 

 real source of alterations in the language ; for when a word> from being 

 often employed in cases where one of the qualities which it connotes 

 does not exist, ceases to suggest that quality with certainty, then even 

 those who are under no mistake as to the proper meaning of the word, 

 prefer expressing that meaning in some other way, and leave the orig- 

 inal word to its fate. The word 'Squire, as standing, for an owner of 

 a landed estate; Parson, as denoting not the rector of the parish but 

 clergymen in general; Artist, to denote only a painter or sculptor; are 



