we learn words first in their application to individual cases. Nobody
ever defined _good_ to us, or _fair_, or _kind_, or _highly educated_.
We hear the words applied to individual objects: we utter them in the
same connexion: we extend them to other objects that strike us as like
without knowing the precise points of likeness that the convention
of common speech includes. The more exact meaning we learn by
gradual induction from individual cases. _Ugly_, _beautiful_, _good_,
_bad_--we learn the words first as applicable to things and persons:
gradually there arises a more or less definite sense of what the
objects so designated have in common. The individual's extension of
the name proceeds upon what in the objects has most impressed him
when he caught the word: this may differ in different individuals; the
usage of neighbours corrects individual eccentricities. The child
in arms shouts _Da_ at the passing stranger who reminds him of his
father: for him at first it is a general name applicable to every man:
by degrees he learns that for him it is a singular name.

The mode in which words are learnt and extended may be studied most
simply in the nursery. A child, say, has learnt to say _mambro_ when
it sees its nurse. The nurse works a hand-turned sewing machine,
and sings to it as she works. In the street the child sees an
organ-grinder singing as he turns his handle: it calls _mambro_:
the nurse catches the meaning and the child is overjoyed. The
organ-grinder has a monkey: the child has an india-rubber monkey toy:
it calls this also _mambro_. The name is extended to a monkey in
a picture-book. It has a toy musical box with a handle: this also
becomes _mambro_, the word being extended along another line of
resemblance. A stroller with a French fiddle comes within the
denotation of the word: a towel-rail is also called _mambro_ from some
fancied resemblance to the fiddle. A very swarthy hunch-back _mambro_
frightens the child: this leads to the transference of the word to a
terrific coalman with a bag of coals on his back. In a short time
the word has become a name for a great variety of objects that have
nothing whatever common to all of them, though each is strikingly like
in some point to a predecessor in the series. When the application
becomes too heterogeneous, the word ceases to be of use as a sign and
is gradually abandoned, the most impressive meaning being the last
to go. In a child's vocabulary where the wo