mes shifts not only by reason of gradual
inattention to some of the common properties, which, if language were
ruled by convention alone, would be in their entirety both the perpetual
and the sole constituents of the connotation; but also from the
incorporation in the connotation, in addition to these, and often,
finally, to the _exclusion_ of them altogether, of other circumstances
at first only casually associated with it. These collateral associations
are the cause why there are so few exact synonymes; and why the
dictionary meaning, or Definition, is so bad a guide to its uses, as
compared with its history, since the latter explains the law of the
succession by showing the causes which determined the successive uses.

Two counter-movements are always going on in language. One is
generalisation, by which words are ever losing part of their
connotation, and becoming more general. This arises, partly from men,
such as historians and travellers, using words, especially those
expressing complicated mental and social facts strange to them, in a
loose sense, in ignorance of the true connotation; partly, from known
things multiplying faster than names for them; partly, also, from the
wish to give people some notion of a new object by reference to a known
thing resembling it however slightly. The other movement is
specialisation; and by it words (even the same words which, as, e.g.
_pagan_ and _villain_, later get generalised in a new direction) are
ever taking a fresh connotation, through their denotation being
diminished. Specialisations often occur even in scientific nomenclature,
a word which expressed general characters becoming confined to a
specific substance in which these characters are predominant. So it is
when any set of persons has to think of one species oftener than of any
other contained in the genus: e.g. some sportsmen mean partridges by the
term _birds_. But, as ideas of our pleasures and pains and their
supposed causes, cling, most of all, by association to what they have
been once connected with, the great source of specialisation is the
addition of the ideas of agreeableness or painfulness, and approbation
or censure, to the connotation. And hence arises the fallacy of
_question-begging_ names referred to later on.

It is the business of logicians not to ignore, for they cannot prevent,
transformations of terms in common use, but to trace and embody them,
and men's half unconscious reasons for them, in