ed to grasp them all individually in our conception, we should be as little able to comprehend, as to gather all the masses of all the planets in the narrow concavity of that hand which a few particles are sufficient to fill, and which soon sinks oppressed with the weight of the few particles that fill it.

That man can reason, without language of any kind, and consequently without general terms, though the opposite opinion is maintained by many very eminent philosophers,-seems to me not to admit of any reasonable doubt, or, if it required any proof, to be sufficiently shown, by the very invention of the language which involves these general terms, and still more sensibly by the conduct of the uninstructed deaf and dumb,-to which also, the evident marks of reasoning in the other animals,-of reasoning which I cannot but think as unquestionable as the instincts that mingle with it,-may be said to furnish a very striking additional argument from analogy. But it is not less certain, that, without general terms, reasoning must be very imperfect, and scarcely worthy of the name, when compared with that noble power which language has rendered it. The art of definition,—which is merely the art of fixing, in a single word or phrase, the particular circumstance of agreement of various individual objects, which, in consequence of this feeling of relation, we have chosen to class together, gives us certain fixed points of reference, both for ourselves and others, without which, it would be impossible for us to know the progress which we have made,-impossible to remember accurately the results even of a single reasoning, and to apply them with profit to future analysis. Nor would knowledge be vague only, it would, but for general terms, be as incommunicable as vague; for it must be remembered, that such terms form almost the whole of the great medium by which we communicate with each other. "Grammarians," says Dr. Reid, "have reduced all words to eight or nine classes, which are called parts of speech. Of these there is only one, to wit, that of nouns, wherein proper names are found. All pronouns, verbs, participles, adverbs, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections, are general words. Of nouns, all adjectives are general words, and the greater part of substantives. Every substantive that has a plural number, is a general word; for no proper name can have a plural number, because it signifies only one individual. In all the fifteen books of Euclid's Elements," he continues, "there is not one word that is not general; and the same may be said of many large volumes."*

In the account which Swift gives of his Academy of Projectors in Lagado, he mentions one project for making things supply the place of language; and he speaks only of the difficulty of carrying about all the things necessary for discourse, which would be by far the least evil of this species of eloquence; since all the things of the universe, even though they could be carried about as commodiously as a watch or a snuff-box, could not supply the place of language, which expresses chiefly the relations of things, and which, even when it expresses things themselves, is of no use but as expressing or implying those relations, which they bear to us or to each other."

"There was a scheme," he says, "for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever, and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health as well as brevity. For it is plain, that every word we speak is, in some degree, a diminution of our lungs by corrosion, and, consequently, contributes to the

* Reid on the Intellectual Powers, Essay V. c. 1.

shortening of our lives. An expedient was therefore offered, that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on. And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease, as well as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion, unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their forefathers; such constant irreconcileable enemies to science are the common people. However, many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which has only this inconvenience attending it, that, if a man's business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of these sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlers among us; who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together, then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave."*

I cannot but think, that, to a genius like that of Swift, a finer subject of philosophical ridicule, than the mere difficulty which his sages felt in carrying a sufficient stock of things about with them, might have been found in their awkward attempts to make these things supply the place of abstract language. In his own great field of political irony, for example, how many subjects of happy satire might he have found in the emblems, to which his patriots and courtiers, in their most zealous professions of public devotion, might have been obliged to have recourse; the painful awkwardness of the political expectant of places and dignities, who was outwardly to have no wish but for the welfare of his country, yet could find nothing but mitres, and maces, and seals, and pieces of stamped metal, with which to express the purity of his disinterested patriotism; and the hurrying eagerness of the statesman, to change instantly the whole upholstery of language in his house, for new political furniture, in consequence of the mere accident of his removal from office.

Without the use of any such satirical demonstration of the doctrine, however, it is sufficiently evident, that if man had no general terms, verbal language could be but of very feeble additional aid to the language of natural signs; and, if the situation of man would be thus deplorable without the mere signs of general notions, how infinitely more so must it have been, if he had been incapable of the very notions themselves. The whole conduct of life is a perpetual practical application of the intuitive maxim, that similar antecedents will be followed by similar consequents,-which implies the necessity, in every case, of some rude classification of objects as similar. The fire which the child sees to-day, is not the fire which burnt him yesterday; and if he were insensible of the resemblance, to the exclusion, perhaps, of many circumstances that differ, the remembrance of the effect of the fire of yesterday would be of no advantage in guarding him against similar exposure. It is in consequence of notions of little genera and species of good and evil, which he has formed mentally long before he distinguishes them by their appropriate general terms, that the infant is enabled to avoid what would be

* Gulliver's Travels, Part III. c. v.

hurtful, and thus to prolong his existence to the period at which, in applying the multitude of words in his language, in all their varieties of inflexion, he shows, that he has long been philosophizing, in circumstances, that seemed to indicate little more than the capacity of animal pleasure or pain, and innocent affection. What, indeed, can be more truly astonishing, than the progress which a being so very helpless, and apparently so incapable of any systematic effort, or even of the very wish which such an effort implies, makes, in so short a time, in connecting ideas and sounds that have no relation but what is purely arbitrary, and in adapting them, with all those nice modifications of expression, according to circumstances, of which he can scarcely be thought to have any conception so distinct and accurate as the very language which he uses. "We cannot instruct them," it has been truly remarked, "without speaking to them in a language which they do not understand; and yet they learn it. Even when we speak to them, it is usually without any design of instructing them; and they learn, in like manner, of themselves, without any design of learning. We never speak to them of the rules of syntax; and they practise all these rules without knowing what they are. In a single year or two, they have formed in their heads a grammar, a dictionary, and almost a little art of rhetoric, with which they know well how to persuade and to charm us."*"Is it not a hard thing, says Berkeley, "that a couple of children cannot prate together of their sugar-plums and rattles, and the rest of their little trinkets, till they have first tacked together numberless inconsistencies, and so formed in their minds abstract general ideas, and annexed them to every common name they make use of?" All this early generalization, admirable as it is, is certainly not, as he says, a hard thing, for it is the result of laws of mind, as simple as the laws on which the very perception of the sugar-plums and rattles depended; but it is a beautiful illustration of that very principle of general nomenclature which Berkeley adduced it to disprove. If children can discover two rattles, or two sugar-plums, to be like each other, and the possibility of this surely no one will deny, who may not, in like manner, deny the possibility of those sensations by which they perceive a single rattle, or a single sugar-plum; they must already have formed those abstract general notions, which are said to be so hard a thing,-for this very feeling of similarity is all which constitutes the general notion, and when the general notion of the resemblance of the two objects has arisen, it is as little wonderful that the general term rattle or sugar-plum should be used to express it, as that any particular name should be used to express each separate inhabitant or familiar visitor of the nursery, or any other word of any other kind to express any other existing feeling.

The perception of objects, the feeling of their resemblance in certain respects, the invention of a name for these circumstances of felt resemblance,-what can be more truly and readily conceivable than this process! And yet on this process, apparently so very simple, has been founded all that controversy as to universals, which so long distracted the schools; and which far more wonderfully, for the distraction of the schools by a few unintelligible words scarcely can be counted wonderful,-continues still to perplex philosophers with difficulties which themselves have made,-with difficulties which they could not even have made to themselves, if they had thought for

* André, p. 221.

a single moment of the nature of that feeling of the relation of similarity which we are now considering.

My further remarks on the theory of general notions I must defer till my next Lecture.

LECTURE XLVI.

ON THE RELATIVE FEELINGS BELONGING TO THE ORDER OF CO-EXISTENCE, CONTINUED—METAPHYSICAL ERRORS CONCERNING THEM INVOLVED IN THE HYPOTHESES OF REALISM AND NOMINALISM.

HAVING brought to a conclusion my remarks on the phenomena of Simple Suggestion, I entered, in my last Lecture, on the consideration of those states of mind which constitute our feelings of relation, the results of that peculiar mental tendency to which, as distinguished from the simple suggestion that furnishes the other class of our intellectual states of mind, I have given the name of Relative Suggestion. The relations which we are thus capable of feeling, as they rise by internal suggestion, on the mere perception or conception of two or more objects, I divided,-in conformity with our primary division of the objects of physical inquiry,-into the relations of co-existence, and the relations of succession, according as the notion of time or change is not or is involved in them; and the former of these, the relations that are considered by us without any regard to time,-I arranged in subdivisions, according to the notions which they involve, 1st, Of Position; 2d, Resemblance, or Difference; 3d, Of Degree; 4th, Of Proportion; 5th, of Comprehensiveness, or the relation which a whole bears to the separate parts that are included in it.

These various relations I briefly illustrated in the order in which I have now mentioned them, and showed, how very simple that mental process is by which they arise; as simple indeed, and as easily conceivable, as that by which the primary perceptions themselves arise. On some of them, however, I felt it necessary to dwell with fuller elucidation; not on account of any greater mystery in the suggestions on which they depend, but on account of that greater mystery which has been supposed to hang about them.

A great part of my Lecture, accordingly, was employed in considering the relation of resemblance, which, by the general notions and corresponding general terms that flow from it, we found to be the source of classification and definition, and of all that is valuable in language.

A horse, an ox, a sheep, have, in themselves, as individual beings, precisely the same qualities, whether the others be or be not considered by us at the same time. When, in looking at them, we are struck with their resemblance in certain respects, they are themselves exactly the same individuals as before, the only change which has taken place being a feeling of our own mind. And, in like manner, in the next stage of the process of verbal generalization, when in consequence of this feeling of relation in our own minds, we proceed to term them quadrupeds or animals, no quality has been taken from the objects which we have ranged together under this new term, and as little has any new quality been given to them. Every thing in the objects

is precisely the same as before, and acts in precisely the same manner on our senses, as when the word quadruped or animal was uninvented. The general terms are expressive of our own internal feelings of resemblance, and of nothing more,-expressive of what is in us, and dependent wholly on laws of mind, not of what is in them, and directly dependent in any degree on laws of matter.

That, in looking at a horse, an ox, a sheep, we should be struck with a feeling of their resemblance in certain respects, that to those respects, in which they are felt to resemble each other, we should give a name, as we give a name to each of them individually, comprehending under the general name such objects only as excite, when considered together with others, the feeling of this particular relation,-all this has surely nothing very mysterious in it. It would, indeed, be more mysterious, if, perceiving the resemblances of objects that are constantly around us, we did not avail ourselves of language, as a mode of communicating to others our feeling of the resemblance, as we avail ourselves of it in the particular denomination of the individual, to inform others of that particular object of which we speak; and to express the common resemblance which we feel by any word, is to have invented already a general term, significant of the felt relation. The process is in itself sufficiently simple; and, if we had never heard of any controversies with respect to it, we probably could not have suspected, that the mere giving of a name to resemblances which all perceive, and the subsequent application of the name only where the resemblance is felt, should have been thought to have any thing in it more mysterious, than the mere giving of a name to the separate objects which all perceive, and the repetition of that name when the separate objects are again perceived. It assumes, however, immediately an air of mystery when we are told, that it relates to the predicables of the schools, and to all that long controversy with respect to the essence of universals, which divided not merely schoolman against schoolman, but nation against nation, when kings and emperors, who had so many other frivolous causes of warfare, without the addition of this, were eager to take up arms, and besiege towns, and cover fields with wounded and dead, for the honour of the universal a parte rei. It is difficult for us to think, that that could be simple which could produce so much fierce contention; and we strive to explain in our own mind, and, therefore, begin to see many wonderful, and perhaps unintelligible, or at least doubtful things, in phenomena, which we never should have conceived to require explanation, if others had not laboured to explain them, by clouding them with words. It is with many intellectual controversies as with the gymnastic exercises of the arena; the dust which the conflict itself raises soon darkens that air which was clear before, -and the longer the conflict lasts, the greater the dimness which arises from it.

When the combatants are very many, and the combat very long and active, we may still, indeed, be able to see the mimicry of fight, and distinguish the victors from the vanquished; but even then we scarcely see distinctly; and all which remains, when the victory at last is won, or when both parties are sufficiently choaked with dust and weary, is the cloud of sand which they have raised, and perhaps some traces of the spots where each has fallen.

It surely cannot be denied, that the mind, with its other susceptibilities of feeling, has a susceptibility also of the feeling of the relation of similarity; or, in other words, that certain objects, when we perceive or think of them