alive old experience, alien perhaps to present
tendencies. In any case, words are always in danger of losing part of
their connotation. For, just one or two out of a complex cluster of
ideas, and sometimes merely the look or sound of the word itself, is
often all that is absolutely necessary for the suggesting another set of
ideas to continue the process of thought; and consequently, some
metaphysicians have even fancied that all reasoning is but the
mechanical use of terms according to a certain form. If persons be not
of active imaginations, the only antidote against the propensity to let
slip the connotation of names, is the habit of predicating of them the
properties connoted; though even the propositions themselves, as may be
seen from the way in which maxims of Religion, Ethics, and Politics are
used, are often repeated merely mechanically, not being questioned, but
also not being felt. Much of our knowledge recorded in words is ever
oscillating between its tendency, in consequence of different
generations attending exclusively to different properties in names, to
become partially dormant, and the counter-efforts of individuals, at
times, to revive it by tracing the forgotten properties historically in
the almost mechanically repeated formulas of propositions; and, when
they have been there rediscovered, promulgating them, not as
discoveries, but with authority as what men still profess to believe.
The danger is, lest the formula itself be dismissed by clear-headed
narrow-minded logicians, and the connotation fixed by them (in order
that the denotation may be extended) in accordance with the present use
of the term. Then, if the truths be at any time rediscovered, the
prejudice is against them as novelties. The _selfish_ theory of morals
partly fell because the inconsistency of received formulas with it
prompted a reconsideration of its basis. What would have been the result
if the formulas attaching odium to selfishness, praise to
self-sacrifice, had been dismissed, if this indeed had been possible!
Language, in short, is the depositary of all experience, which, being
the inheritance of posterity, we have a right to vary, but none to
curtail. We may improve the conclusions of our ancestors; we should not
let drop any of their premisses; we may alter a word's connotation; but
we must not destroy part of it.

CHAPTER V.

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

The connotation of na