Page:Observations on Man 1834.djvu/214

 It seems practicable to make a dictionary of any language, in which the words of that language shall all be explained with precision by words of the same language, to persons who have no more than a gross knowledge of that language. Now this also shews, that, with care and candour, we might come to understand one another perfectly. Thus sensible qualities might be fixed by the bodies, in which they are most eminent and distinct; the names of a sufficient number of these bodies being very well known. After this, these very bodies, and all others, might be defined by their sensible properties; and these two processes would help each other indefinitely, actions might be described from animals already defined, also from the modes of extension, abstract terms defined, and the peculiar use of particles ascertained. And such a dictionary would, in some measure, be a real as well as a nominal one, and extend to things themselves. The writer of every new and difficult work may execute that part of such a dictionary which belongs to his subject; at least in the instances where he apprehends the reader is likely to want it.

. V. When words have acquired any considerable power of exciting pleasant or painful vibrations in the nervous system, by being often associated with such things as do this, they may transfer a part of these pleasures and pains upon indifferent things, by being at other times often associated with such. This is one of the principal sources of the several factitious pleasures and pains of human life. Thus, to give an instance from childhood, the words sweet, good, pretty, fine, &c., on the one hand, and the words bad, ugly, frightful, &c., on the other, being applied by the nurse and attendants in the young child’s hearing almost promiscuously, and without those restrictions that are observed in correct speaking, the one to all the pleasures, the other to all the pains of the several senses, must by association raise up general pleasant and painful vibrations, in which no one part can be distinguished above the rest; and when applied by farther associations to objects of a neutral kind, they must transfer a general pleasure or pain upon them.

All the words associated with pleasures must also affect each other by this promiscuous application. And the same holds in respect of the words associated with pains. However, since both the original and the transferred pleasures and pains heaped upon different words are different, and in some cases widely so, every remarkable word will have a peculiar internal feeling, or sentiment, belonging to it; and there will be the same relations of affinity, disparity, and opposition, between these internal sentiments, i.e. ideas, belonging to words, as between the several genera and species of natural bodies, between tastes, smells, colours, &c. Many of these ideas, though affording considerable pleasure at first, must sink into the limits of indifference; and some of those which afforded pain at first, into the limits of pleasure. What is here said of words, belongs to clusters of