Page:System of Logic.djvu/479

 with one another; it continually happens that a word is used in two or more senses derived from each other, but yet radically distinct. So long as a term is vague, that is, so long as its connotation is not ascertained and permanently fixed, it is constantly liable to be applied by extension from one thing to another, until it reaches things which have little, or even no, resemblance to those which were first designated by it.

"Suppose," says Dugald Stewart, in his Philosophical Essays,(215) "that the letters A, B, C, D, E, denote a series of objects; that A possesses some one quality in common with B; B a quality in common with C; C a quality in common with D; D a quality in common with E; while at the same time, no quality can be found which belongs in common to any three objects in the series. Is it not conceivable, that the affinity between A and B may produce a transference of the name of the first to the second; and that, in consequence of the other affinities which connect the remaining objects together, the same name may pass in succession from B to C; from C to D; and from D to E? In this manner, a common appellation will arise between A and E, although the two objects may, in their nature and properties, be so widely distant from each other, that no stretch of imagination can conceive how the thoughts were led from the former to the latter. The transitions, nevertheless, may have been all so easy and gradual, that, were they successfully detected by the fortunate ingenuity of a theorist, we should instantly recognize, not only the verisimilitude, but the truth of the conjecture: in the same way as we admit, with the confidence of intuitive conviction, the certainty of the well-known etymological process which connects the Latin preposition e or ex with the English substantive stranger, the moment that the intermediate links of the chain are submitted to our examination."(216)

The applications which a word acquires by this gradual extension of it from one set of objects to another, Stewart, adopting an expression from Mr. Payne Knight, calls its transitive applications; and after briefly illustrating such of them as are the result of local or casual associations, he proceeds as follows:(217)

"But although by far the greater part of the transitive or derivative applications of words depend on casual and unaccountable caprices of the feelings or the fancy, there are certain cases in which they open a very