and characteristic names, the meaning had been expressed by putting together a number of other names, that particular combination of words already in common use for other purposes would have had nothing to make itself remembered by. If we want to render a particular combination of ideas permanent in the mind, there is nothing which clinches it like a name specially devoted to express it. If mathematicians had been obliged to speak of "that to which a quantity, in increasing or diminishing, is always approaching nearer, so that the difference becomes less than any assignable quantity, but to which it never becomes exactly equal," instead of expressing all this by the simple phrase, "the limit of a quantity," we should probably have long remained without most of the important truths which have been discovered by means of the relation between quantities of various kinds and their limits. If instead of speaking of momentum, it had been necessary to say, "the product of the number of units of velocity in the velocity by the number of units of mass in the mass," many of the dynamical truths now apprehended by means of this complex idea would probably have escaped notice, for want of recalling the idea itself with sufficient readiness and familiarity. And on subjects less remote from the topics of popular discussion, whoever wishes to draw attention to some new or unfamiliar distinction among things, will find no way so sure as to invent or select suitable names for the express purpose of marking it.
A volume devoted to explaining what the writer means by civilization, does not raise so vivid a conception of it as the single expression, that Civilization is a different thing from Cultivation; the compactness of that brief designation for the contrasted quality being an equivalent for a long discussion. So, if we would impress forcibly upon the understanding and memory the distinction between the two different conceptions of a representative government, we can not more effectually do so than by saying that Delegation is not Representation. Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind, or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly-selected words or phrases have, as it were, nailed them down and held them fast.
§ 4. Of the three essential parts of a philosophical language, we have now mentioned two: a terminology suited for describing with precision the individual facts observed; and a name for every common property of any importance or interest, which we detect by comparing those facts; including (as the concretes corresponding to those abstract terms) names for the classes which we artificially construct in virtue of those properties, or as many of them, at least, as we have frequent occasion to predicate any thing of.
But there is a sort of classes, for the recognition of which no such elaborate process is necessary; because each of them is marked out from all others not by some one property, the detection of which may depend on a difficult act of abstraction, but by its properties generally. I mean, the Kinds of things, in the sense which, in this treatise, has been specially attached to that term. By a Kind, it will be remembered, we mean one of those classes which are distinguished from all others not by one or a few definite properties, but by an unknown multitude of them; the combination of properties on which the class is grounded, being a mere index to an indefinite number of other distinctive attributes. The class horse is a Kind, because the things which agree in possessing the characters by which
