e connected to some extent, though not
so closely as was formerly supposed, with the grammatical distinctions
of parts of speech. It is easy, however, to be misled by grammar,
particularly if all the languages we know belong to one family. In some
languages, according to some authorities, the distinction of parts of
speech does not exist; in many languages it is widely different from
that to which we are accustomed in the Indo-European languages. These
facts have to be borne in mind if we are to avoid giving metaphysical
importance to mere accidents of our own speech.

In considering what words mean, it is natural to start with proper
names, and we will again take "Napoleon" as our instance. We commonly
imagine, when we use a proper name, that we mean one definite entity,
the particular individual who was called "Napoleon." But what we know
as a person is not simple. There MAY be a single simple ego which was
Napoleon, and remained strictly identical from his birth to his death.
There is no way of proving that this cannot be the case, but there is
also not the slightest reason to suppose that it is the case. Napoleon
as he was empirically known consisted of a series of gradually changing
appearances: first a squalling baby, then a boy, then a slim and
beautiful youth, then a fat and slothful person very magnificently
dressed This series of appearances, and various occurrences having
certain kinds of causal connections with them, constitute Napoleon as
empirically known, and therefore are Napoleon in so far as he forms
part of the experienced world. Napoleon is a complicated series of
occurrences, bound together by causal laws, not, like instances of a
word, by similarities. For although a person changes gradually, and
presents similar appearances on two nearly contemporaneous occasions,
it is not these similarities that constitute the person, as appears from
the "Comedy of Errors" for example.

Thus in the case of a proper name, while the word is a set of similar
series of movements, what it means is a series of occurrences bound
together by causal laws of that special kind that makes the occurrences
taken together constitute what we call one person, or one animal or
thing, in case the name applies to an animal or thing instead of to
a person. Neither the word nor what it names is one of the ultimate
indivisible constituents of the world. In language there is no direct
way of designating one of the ultimate brief exist