The Divine Lamp

Article 6.  Forth defect: Smith does not understand the true distinction between common and proper nouns.

144.  I think that by this time the reader must already have begun to feel serious misgivings about a reasoning which, although it seemed at first sight very plausible, and based on the apparently truthful description of a perfectly natural fact, has been found, upon examination, to contain, in a few phrases, so many inaccuracies.

Adam Smith gave us to understand that common nouns simply signified ‘multitudes’ of individuals; but on enumerating the four kinds of names expressive of such ‘multitudes,’ we discovered that not one of them was common to many individuals.

We next examined the general or abstract names, which denote single qualities, essential or accidental, and we found that they also are not common to many individuals, but proper to a common quality.

Lastly, in these general or abstract names, or rather in the ideas which they represent to us, we have found that their nature consists simply in expressing a judgment whereby a quality is attributed to a subject, or in designating an object through a quality which indicates or makes it known to us, and which being common to many subjects, causes the same name to be applicable to each of them.  But we must proceed.

145.  The nature of common nouns being now ascertained, let us see what is the nature of proper nouns.

Both common and proper nouns express individuals and not collections of individuals, but with this difference: that while the common noun designates and distinguishes an  individual through a quality belonging to it, the proper noun makes known the individual, not through a quality of it, but directly; it expressed, so to speak, int individuality.  Now, individuality as such is essential incommunicable, essentially exclusive of everything but its own proper self.  One individual cannot be another.  hence a proper noun can apply to one individual only.  On the contrary, a common noun, by indicating a being through a quality which may be found equally in other beings, does not single it out with such precision as absolutely to contra-distinguish and isolate it from all others.  Whatever being has the same quality is entitled to the same name.  Thus the word man, unless when used in the abstract sense of humanity, signifies not many but only one man; yet as the one man is named from humanity, a quality common to all other men, the same word can be applied to them as well as to him.  But the case would be different if, instead of calling him man, I were to call him Peter; for this second name would not be derived from a quality common to other men, but would be used by me expressly to signify that individuality which belongs exclusively to Peter, and which in consequence cannot be communicated to any other person.

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