uired another meaning. Spenser and
Shakespeare, besides this practice, sometimes use words in a way that
can only be justified by their choosing to have it so; whilst their
contemporaries, Beaumont and Fletcher, write the perfect modern
language, as Dryden observed. Lapse of time, however, is not the chief
cause of variation in the sense of words. The matters which terms are
used to denote are often so complicated or so refined in the assemblage,
interfusion, or gradation of their qualities, that terms do not exist in
sufficient abundance and discriminativeness to denote the things and, at
the same time, to convey by connotation a determinate sense of their
agreements and differences. In discussing politics, religion, ethics,
aesthetics, this imperfection of language is continually felt; and the
only escape from it, short of coining new words, is to use such words as
we have, now in one sense, now in another somewhat different, and to
trust to the context, or to the resources of the literary art, in order
to convey the true meaning. Against this evil the having been born since
Dryden is no protection. It behoves us, then, to remember that terms are
not classifiable into Univocal and AEquivocal, but that all terms are
susceptible of being used aequivocally, and that honesty and lucidity
require us to try, as well as we can, to use each term univocally in the
same context.

The context of any proposition always proceeds upon some assumption or
understanding as to the scope of the discussion, which controls the
interpretation of every statement and of every word. This was called by
De Morgan the "universe of discourse": an older name for it, revived by
Dr. Venn, and surely a better one, is _suppositio_. If we are talking of
children, and 'play' is mentioned, the _suppositio_ limits the
suggestiveness of the word in one way; whilst if Monaco is the subject
of conversation, the same word 'play,' under the influence of a
different _suppositio_, excites altogether different ideas. Hence to
ignore the _suppositio_ is a great source of fallacies of equivocation.
'Man' is generally defined as a kind of animal; but 'animal' is often
used as opposed to and excluding man. 'Liberal' has one meaning under
the _suppositio_ of politics, another with regard to culture, and still
another as to the disposal of one's private means. Clearly, therefore,
the connotation of general terms is relative to the _suppositio_, or
"universe of discours