VARIATIONS IV MEANING OF TERMS. 417 



cases in point. Independently, however, of the generalization of 

 names through their ignorant misuse, there is a tendency in the same 

 direction, consistently with the most thorough knowledge of their 

 meaning; arising from the fact, that the number of things known to 

 us, and of which we feel a desire to speak, nudtiply faster than the 

 names for them. Except on subjects for wliicli there has been con- 

 structed a scientific terminology, with which unscientific persons do 

 not meddle, great dithculty is generally f<)und in bringing a new name 

 into use; and independently of that difficulty, it is natural to prefer 

 giving to a new object a name which at least expresses its resemblance 

 to something already known, since by predicating of it a name entirely 

 new we at first convey no information. In this manner the name of a 

 species often becomes the name of a genus; as salt, for example, or 

 oil; the former of which words originally denoted only the muriate of 

 soda, the latter, as its etymology indicates, only olive oil ; but which 

 now denote large and diversified classes of substances resembling 

 these in some of their qualities, and connote only those common quali- 

 ties, instead of the whole of the distinctive properties of olive oil and 

 sea salt. Tlie words glass and soap are used by modern chemists in a 

 similar manner, to denote genera of which the substances vulgai'ly so 

 called are single species.* And it often happens, as in those instances, 

 that the term keeps its special signification in addition to its more gen- 

 eral one, and becomes ambiguous, that is, two names instead of one. 



These changes, by which words in ordinary use become more and 

 more generalized, and less and less expressive, take place in a still 

 greater degree with the words which express the complicated phe- 

 nomena of mind and society. Historians, travellers, and in general 

 those who speak or write concerning moral and social phenomena with 

 which they are not familiarly acquainted, are the great agents in this 

 modification of language. The vocabulary of all except unusually 

 instructed persons, is, on such subjects, eminently scanty. They have 

 a certain small set of words to which they are accustomed, and which 

 they employ to express phenomena the most heterogeneous, because 

 they have never sufficiently analyzed the facts to which those words 

 correspond in their own country, to have attached perfectly definite 

 ideas to the words. The first English conquerors of Bengal, for ex- 

 ample, carried with them the phrase landed proprietor into a country 

 where the rights of individuals over the soil were extremely different 

 in degree, and even in nature, from those recognized in England. 

 Applying the term with all its English associaticms in such a state of 

 things ; to one who had only a limited right they gave an absolute right, 

 from another because he had not an alisolute right they took away all 

 right, drove whole classes of men to ruin and despair, filled the country 

 with banditti, created a feeling that nothing was secure, and produced, 

 with the best intentions, a disorganization of society which had not 

 been produced in that country by the most ruthless of its barbarian 

 invaders. Paul Louis Courier might well say, " Gardez-nous de I'equi- 

 voque !" Yet the usage of persons capable of so gross a misappre- 

 hension, determines the meaning of language : and the words they thus 



*" The term a?/t«/i, in its original sense, signified that particular rcsidmim which was 

 alone obtained by lixiviating the ashes of the plant named kali, but the word is now so gen- 

 eralized, that it drnotcs any body possessed of a certain number of properties." — Paris's 

 Pharmacologia, vol. j., p. 68. 



3G 



