Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/166

 termine this sort of ideas, there is only one means, which is to construct a language properly.

This confirms what we have already demonstrated how necessary words are to us: for if we had no general terms, we should have no abstract ideas, we should have neither genera, or species, and without genera and species, we could reason upon nothing. But if we reason only by means of words this is a new proof that we can only reason well or ill, according as the language, in which we reason is well or ill made. The analysis of our thoughts can only enable us to reason in proportion as by instructing us how to class our abstract ideas, it enables us how to form our language correctly, and the whole art of reasoning is thus reduced to the art of well speaking.”

What in this supremacy of words is to be the criterion of well speaking the Abbé does not say.

To speak, to reason, to form general or abstract ideas, are then in fact the same thing: and this truth, simple as it is, might pass for a discovery. Certainly, men in general have not had any notion of it; this is evident from the manner in which they speak and reason; it is evident from the abuse which they make of abstract ideas; finally, it is evident from the difficulties which those persons confessedly find in conceiving of abstract ideas who have so little in speaking of them.

The art of reasoning resolves into the construction of languages, only because the order of our ideas itself depends entirely on the subordination that subsists between the names given to genera and species; and as we arrive at new ideas only by forming new classes, it follows that we can only determine or define our ideas by determining their classes. In this case we should reason well, because