Page:System of Logic.djvu/488

 denote them; and pagan came not only to mean heathen, but to mean that exclusively.

A case still more familiar to most readers is that of the word villain or villein. This term, as every body knows, had in the Middle Ages a connotation as strictly defined as a word could have, being the proper legal designation for those persons who were the subjects of the less onerous forms of feudal bondage. The scorn of the semi-barbarous military aristocracy for these their abject dependants, rendered the act of likening any person to this class of people a mark of the greatest contumely; the same scorn led them to ascribe to the same people all manner of hateful qualities, which doubtless also, in the degrading situation in which they were held, were often not unjustly imputed to them. These circumstances combined to attach to the term villain ideas of crime and guilt, in so forcible a manner that the application of the epithet even to those to whom it legally belonged became an affront, and was abstained from whenever no affront was intended. From that time guilt was part of the connotation; and soon became the whole of it, since mankind were not prompted by any urgent motive to continue making a distinction in their language between bad men of servile station and bad men of any other rank in life.

These and similar instances in which the original signification of a term is totally lost--another and an entirely distinct meaning being first ingrafted upon the former, and finally substituted for it--afford examples of the double movement which is always taking place in language: two counter-movements, one of Generalization, by which words are perpetually losing portions of their connotation, and becoming of less meaning and more general acceptation; the other of Specialization, by which other, or even these same words, are continually taking on fresh connotation; acquiring additional meaning by being restricted in their employment to a part only of the occasions on which they might properly be used before. This double movement is of sufficient importance in the natural history of language (to which natural history the artificial modifications ought always to have some degree of reference), to justify our dwelling a little longer on the nature of the twofold phenomenon, and the causes to which it owes its existence.

§ 3. To begin with the movement of generalization. It might seem unnecessary to dwell on the changes in the meaning of names which take place merely from their being used ignorantly, by persons who, not having properly mastered the received connotation of a word, apply it in a looser and wider sense than belongs to it. This, however, is a real source of alterations in the language; for when a word, from being often employed in cases where one of the qualities which it connotes does not exist, ceases to suggest that quality with certainty, then even those who are under no mistake as to the proper meaning of the word, prefer expressing that meaning in some other way, and leave the original word to its fate. The word 'Squire, as standing for an owner of a landed estate; Parson, as denoting not the rector of the parish, but clergymen in general; Artist, to denote only a painter or sculptor; are cases in point. Such cases give a clear insight into the process of the degeneration of languages in periods of history when literary culture was suspended; and we are now in danger of experiencing a similar evil through the superficial extension of the same culture. So many persons without any thing deserving the name of education have become writers by profession, that written language may