Chapter 45

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE VARIATION IN THE MEANING OF TERMS.

The connotation of names shifts not only by reason of gradual inattention to some of the common properties, which, if language were ruled by convention alone, would be in their entirety both the perpetual and the sole constituents of the connotation; but also from the incorporation in the connotation, in addition to these, and often, finally, to the _exclusion_ of them altogether, of other circumstances at first only casually associated with it. These collateral associations are the cause why there are so few exact synonymes; and why the dictionary meaning, or Definition, is so bad a guide to its uses, as compared with its history, since the latter explains the law of the succession by showing the causes which determined the successive uses.

Two counter-movements are always going on in language. One is generalisation, by which words are ever losing part of their connotation, and becoming more general. This arises, partly from men, such as historians and travellers, using words, especially those expressing complicated mental and social facts strange to them, in a loose sense, in ignorance of the true connotation; partly, from known things multiplying faster than names for them; partly, also, from the wish to give people some notion of a new object by reference to a known thing resembling it however slightly. The other movement is specialisation; and by it words (even the same words which, as, e.g. _pagan_ and _villain_, later get generalised in a new direction) are ever taking a fresh connotation, through their denotation being diminished. Specialisations often occur even in scientific nomenclature, a word which expressed general characters becoming confined to a specific substance in which these characters are predominant. So it is when any set of persons has to think of one species oftener than of any other contained in the genus: e.g. some sportsmen mean partridges by the term _birds_. But, as ideas of our pleasures and pains and their supposed causes, cling, most of all, by association to what they have been once connected with, the great source of specialisation is the addition of the ideas of agreeableness or painfulness, and approbation or censure, to the connotation. And hence arises the fallacy of _question-begging_ names referred to later on.

It is the business of logicians not to ignore, for they cannot prevent, transformations of terms in common use, but to trace and embody them, and men's half unconscious reasons for them, in distinct definitions.