The Divine Lamp

Article 4.  Second defect: Smith does not distinguish the names indicating multitudes of individuals from those which indicate abstract qualities.

141.  There are names which do not indicate individuals but only their qualities, whether essential or accidental, and considered apart from the rest that goes to make up an individual.  It were useless either to deny or blink this fact.  For example, when I say human nature, hardness, fluidity, &c., I express accidental qualities.

Now these names may, indeed, be called general, but not common; general, because they do not signify individuals, but qualities common to many individuals; not common because the quality to which they severally apply, although found in many individuals, is but one.

That these names cannot rightly be styled ‘common’ is also seen y the fact that, in contradistinction to all common names, they can never be used in the plural number.  Each of them expresses a single thing, abstract and entirely simple, one and indivisible, and therefore impossible to be confused with any other.

Thus while we all speak of human nature, animalities, vegetativeness, whiteness, & c.  

Here, then, is a distinct class of names, which neither designates individuals nor fall under the denomination of ‘common;’ but can only be called generarl or abstract.

Article 5.   Third defect: Smith confounds with common names the names indicating multitudes of individuals and those indicating abstract qualities.

142.  From these general or abstract names, or rather from the idea represented by them, spring those names which are with all propriety called common, because they are applicable to each of many individuals; for instance, the words man, vegetable, animal, cavern, tree, fountain, &c., as also the adjectives white, hard, &c., whether they be used simply as adjectives, or whether, by an elliptical mode of speech, they be taken as substantives.

Now, unless, in analyzing the meaning of these names, we proceed with great caution, we shall easily be deceived by the artificial character of modern languages.  We are generally inclined to believe that to each word there corresponds but one idea, whereas that is not so.  On the contrary, instances of this kind are extremely rare.  The nature of language, and especially of modern languages, is such that in by far the greatest number of cases a single word expresses an idea of the most complex description; that is to say, composed of many other ideas.  Not only this, but that very same word indicates also the link which binds all those ideas together and gives them unity.  Hence it comes to pass that on submitting the meaning of a single term to analysis, we can often translate it into a proposition, and even several propositions.

This is true of the names of which I speak.  The word man, for example, is equivalent to the proposition, ‘A being is possessed of humanity;’ the word tree is convertible into the formula, ‘A being possessed of those properties which constitutes  a tree, and which, if they were to be summed up in a single word, which is wanting in the English language, would be called treeishness.’  And so with these names generally.  In all of them we attribute to beings a certain quality they are found to possess.  hence, under each of these names there lurks a judgment by which, as often as we pronounce or think of them, we attribute a predicate to a subject, while for the sake of brevity we express this operation by a single word which gives us its result, by representing a single coup d’ aeil the relation which we have discovered between that predicate and that subject.  Now, it is only these names which can with propriety be designated as common, since they are applicable to each individual of a certain class.  Thus the word man applies severally to every member of the human race; the word tree to every tree, no matter which; the word cavern to all caverns without exception; and so of all the rest.

143.  Such being the case, I must entirely disagree with the opinion of Adam Smith, that a common noun indicates a ‘multitude’ of individuals.  On the contrary, it invariably indicates one ‘individual’ only; but it does so through a quality common to many, and this is why, after being applied to one individual, it can, ad libitum, be applied to another, and then to another, and so on in succession to all the individuals characterized by the same quality.  If it were true that the word tree, for example, signified a ‘multitude’ of trees, the consequences would be that, when we said trees, we should express many such ‘multitudes.’  But no one has ever thought that, when using this plural, he was expressing anything more than a number of individual trees.

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