connoted. Even some abstracts
are connotative, for attributes may have attributes ascribed to them,
and a word which denotes attributes may connote an attribute of them;
e.g. fault connotes hurtfulness. Proper names, on the other hand, though
concrete, are not connotative. They are merely distinguishing marks,
given perhaps originally for a reason, but, when once given, independent
of it, since the reason is proved to be no part of the sense of the word
by the fact that the name is still used when the reason is forgotten.
But other individual names are connotative. Some of these, viz. those
connoting some attribute or some set of attributes possessed by one
object only, e.g. Sun, God, are really general names, though happening
to be predicable only of a single object. But there are also real
connotative individual names, part of whose meaning is, that there
exists only one individual with the connoted attribute, e.g. The first
Emperor, The father of Socrates; and it is so with many-worded names,
made up of a general name limited by other words, e.g. The present Prime
Minister of England. In short, the meaning of all names, which have any
meaning, resides, not in what they denote, but in what they connote.
There perpetually, however, arises a difficulty of deciding how much
they do connote, that is, what difference in the object would make a
difference in the name. This vagueness comes from our learning the
connotation, through a rude generalisation and analysis, from the
objects denoted. Thus, men use a name without any precise reference to a
definite set of attributes, applying it to new objects on account of
superficial resemblance, so that at length all common meaning
disappears. Even scientific writers, from ignorance, or from the
aversion which men at large feel to the use of new names, often force
old terms to express an ever-growing number of distinctions. But every
concrete general name should be given a definite connotation with the
least possible change in the denotation; and this is what is aimed at in
every definition of a general name already in use. But we must not
confound the use of names of indeterminate connotation, which is so
great an evil, with the employment, necessitated by the paucity of names
as compared with the demand, of the same words with different
connotations in different relations.

A _fourth_ division of names is into Positive and Negative. When the
positive is connotative, so is the co