VARIATIONS IN MEANING OF TERMS. 



453 



the muriate of soda, the latter, as its 

 etymology indicates, only olive oil ; 

 but which now denote large and diver- 

 sified classes of substances resembling 

 these in some of their qualities, and 

 connote only those common qualities, 

 instead of the whole of the distinctive 

 properties of olive oil and sea salt. 

 The words glass and soap are used by 

 modem chemists in a similar manner, 

 to denote genera of which the sub- 

 stances vulgarly 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 general one, and becomes 

 ambiguous, that is, two names instead 

 of one. 



These changes, by which words in 

 ordinary use become more and more 

 generalised, and less and less expres- 

 sive, take place in a still greater de- 

 gree with the words which express 

 the complicated phenomena 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 langu- 

 age. The vocabulary of all except 

 unusually instructed as well as think- 

 ing persons, is, on such subjects, 

 eminently scanty. They have a cer- 

 tain small set of words to which they 

 are accustomed, and which they em- 

 ploy to express phenomena the most 

 heterogeneous, because they have 

 never sufficiently analysed 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 Ben- 

 gal, for example, carried with them 

 the phrase landed proprietor into a 

 country where the rights of indivi- 

 duals over the soil were extremely 

 different in degree, and even in na- 

 ture, from those recognised in Eng- 

 land. Applying the term with all 

 its English associations 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 absolute right they took away 

 all right, drove whole classes of people 

 to ruin and despair, filled the country 

 with banditti, created a feeling that 

 nothing was secure, and produced, 

 with the best intentions, a disorganisa- 

 tion of society which had not been 

 produced in that country by the most 

 ruthless of its barbarian invaders. 

 Yet the usage of persons capable of 

 so gross a misapprehension determines 

 the meaning of language ; and the 

 words they thus misuse grow in 

 generality, until the instructed are 

 obliged to acquiesce, and to employ 

 those words (first freeing them from 

 vagueness by giving them a definite 

 connotation) as generic terms, sub- 

 dividing the genera into species. 



§ 4. While the more rapid growth 

 of ideas than of names thus creates a 

 perpetual necessity for making the 

 same names serve, even if imperfectly, 

 on a greater number of occasions, 

 a counter-operation is going on, by 

 which names become, on the contrary, 

 restricted to fewer occasions, by tak- 

 ing on, as it were, additional connota- 

 tion, from circumstances not origin- 

 ally included in the meaning, but 

 which have become onnected with 

 it in the mind by some accidental 

 cause. We have seen above, in the 

 words pagan and villain, remarkable 

 examples of the specialisation of the 

 meaning of words from casual as- 

 sociations, as well as of the generali- 

 sation of it in a new direction, which 

 often follows. 



Similar specialisations are of fre- 

 quent occurrence in the history even 

 of scientific nomenclature. " It is by 

 no means uncommon," says Dr. Paris 

 in his Pharmacologia* " to find a word 

 which is used to express general char- 

 acters subsequently become the name 

 of a specific substance in which such 

 characters are predominant ; and we 

 shall find that some important ano 

 malies in nomenclature may be thus 

 explained The term ApaeviKOv, from 



* Historical Introductiorii vol. 1. p. 66-68. 



