426 OPERATIONS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION. 



Hardly any original thoughts on raeiital or social subjects ever make 

 their way among mankind or assume their proper importance in the 

 minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases 

 have as it were nailed them down and held them fast. 



§ 4. Of the three essential parts of a philosophical language, we 

 have now mentioned two : a terminology suited for describing with 

 precision the individual facts observed ; and a name for every common 

 property of any importance or interest, which we detect by comparing 

 those facts : including (as the concretes coi'responding to those abstract 

 terms) names for the classes which we artificially construct in virtue of 

 those properties, or as many of them, at least, as we have frequent 

 occasion to predicate anything of. 



But there is a sort of classes, for the recognition of which no such 

 elaborate process is necessary ; because each of them is marked out 

 fi'om all others not by some one property, the detection of which may 

 depend upon a difficult act of abstraction, but by its properties generally. 

 I mean, the Kinds of things, in the sense which, in this treatise, has 

 been systematically attached to that term. By a Kind, it will be re- 

 membered, we mean one of those classes which are distinguished from 

 all others not by one or a few definite properties, but by an unknown 

 multitude of them ; the combination of properties on which the class 

 is grounded, being a mere index to an indefinite number of other dis- 

 tinctive attributes. The class horse is a Kind, because the things which 

 agree in possessing the characters by which we recognize a horse, 

 agree in a gi-eat number of other properties as we know, and it cannot 

 be doubted, in many more than we know. Animal, again, is a Kind, 

 because no definition that could be given of the name animal could 

 either exhaust the properties common to all animals, nor supply prem- 

 isses fi'om which the remainder of those properties could be inlbrred. 

 But a combination of properties which does not give evidence of the 

 existence of any other independent peculiarities, does not constitute a 

 Kind, White horse, therefore, is not a Kind : because horses which 

 agree in whiteness, do not agree in anything else, except in the quali- 

 ties common to all horses, and in whatever may be the causes or efiects 

 of that particular color. • 



On the principle that there should be a name for everything which 

 we have frequent occasion to make assertions about, there ought evi- 

 dently to be a name for every Kind ; for as it is the very nature of a 

 Kind that the individuals composing it have an indefinite multitude of 

 properties in common, it follows that, if not with our present knowl- 

 edge, yet with that which we may hereafter acquire, the Kind is a 

 subject to which there will have to be applied many predicates. The 

 third component element of a philosophical language, therefore, is that 

 there shall be a name for every Kind. In other words, there must 

 not only be a terminology but also a nomenclature. ' 



The words Nomenclature and Terminology are employed by most 

 authors almost indiscriminately ; Mr. Whewell being, as far as I am 

 aware, the first wi'iter who has regularly assigned to the two words 

 different meanings. The distinction however which he has drawn 

 between them being a real and an important one, his example is likely 

 to be followed ; and (as is apt to be the case when such innovations in 

 language are felicitously made) a vague sense of the distinction is found 



