NAMES. 



31 



ft name peculiar to an individual is 

 not necessarily of this description. It 

 may be significant of some attribute, 

 or some union of attributes, which, 

 being possessed by no object but one, 

 determines the name exclusively to 

 that individual. " The sun " is a 

 name of this description; "God," 

 when used by a monotheist, is another. 

 These, however, are scarcely examples 

 of what we are now attempting to 

 illustrate, being, in strictness of lan- 

 guage, general, not individual names : 

 for, however they may be in fact pre- 

 dicable only of one object, there is 

 nothing in the meaning of the words 

 themselves which implies this : and, 

 accordingly, when we are imagining 

 and not affirming, we may speak of 

 many suns ; and the majority of man- 

 kind have believed, and still believe, 

 that there are many gods. But it is 

 easy to produce words which are real 

 instances of connotative individual 

 names. It may be part of tlie mean- 

 ing of the connotative name itself, 

 that there can exist but one individual 

 possessing the attribute which it con- 

 notes : as for instance, " the only son 

 of John Stiles ; " " the first emperor 

 of Rome." Or the attribute connoted 

 may be a connexion with some deter- 

 minate event, and the connexion may 

 be of such a kind as only one indi- 

 vidual could have ; or may at least be 

 such as only one individual actually 

 had ; and this may be implied in the 

 form of the expression. " The father 

 of Socrates" is an example of the 

 one kind (since Socrates could not 

 have had two fathers) ; " the author 

 of the Iliad," " the murderer of Henri 

 Quatre," of the second. For, though 

 it is conceivable that more persons 

 than one might have participated in 

 the authorship of the Iliad, or in the 

 murder of Henri Quatre, the employ- 

 ment of the article the implies that, 

 in fact, this was not the case. What 

 is here done by the word the, is done 

 in other cases by the context : thus, 

 " Caesar's army " is an individual 

 name, if it appears from the context 

 that the army meant is that which 



Caesar commanded in a particular 



battle. The still more general ex- 

 pressions, "the Roman army," or 

 " the Christian army," may be indi- 

 vidualised in a similar manner. An- 

 other case of frequent occurrence has 

 already been noticed ; it is the follow- 

 ing. The name, being a many- worded, 

 one, may consist, in the first place, of 

 a general name, capable therefore in 

 itself of being affirmed of more things 

 than one, but which is, in the second 

 place, so limited by other words joined 

 with it, that the entire expression can 

 only be predicated of one object, con- 

 sistently with the meaning of the 

 general term. This is exemplified in 

 such an instance as the following : 

 " the present Prime Minister of Eng- 

 land." Prime Minister of England 

 is a general name ; the attributes 

 which it connotes may be possessed 

 by an indefinite number of persons : 

 in succession however, not simul- 

 taneously ; since the meaning of the 

 name itself imports (among other 

 things) that there can be only one 

 such person at a time. This being 

 the case, and the application of the 

 name being afterwards limited by 

 the article and the word present, to 

 such individuals as possess the attri- 

 butes at one indivisible point of time, 

 it becomes applicable only to one in- 

 dividual. And as this appears from 

 the meaning of the name, without 

 any extrinsic proof, it is strictly an 

 individual name. 



From the preceding observations it 

 will easily be collected, that whenever 

 the names given to objects convey any 

 information, that is, whenever they 

 have properly any meaning, the mean- 

 ing resides not in what they denote, 

 but in what they connote. The only 

 names of objects which connote no- 

 thing arepropernames; and these have, 

 strictly speaking, no signification.* 



"^ A writer who entitles his book Philo- 

 sophy : or, The Science of Truth, charges me 

 in his veiy first page (referring .at the fnot 

 of it to this passage) with asserting that 

 general names have properly no significa- 

 tion. And he repeats thi.s statement many 

 times in the course of hi* volume, with 



