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Cases are not unfrequent in which a circumstance, at first casually incorporated into the connotation of a word which originally had no reference to it, in time wholly supersedes the original meaning, and becomes not merely a part of the connotation, but the whole of it.
To begin with the movement of generalization. It might seem unnecessary to dwell on the changes in the meaning of names which take place merely from their being used ignorantly, by persons who, not having properly mastered the received connotation of a word, apply it in a looser and wider sense than belongs to it.
The philosopher, therefore, habitually employs his general names with a definite connotation. But language was not made, and can only in some small degree be mended, by philosophers.
And here we must turn our attention to the definitions of attributes, or rather of the names of attributes, that is, of abstract names. In regard to such names of attributes as are connotative, and express attributes of those attributes, there is no difficulty: like other connotative names, they are defined by declaring their connotation.
This surplus of connotation—this which the species connotes over and above the connotation of the genus—is the Differentia, or specific difference; or, to state the same proposition in other words, the Differentia is that which must be added to the connotation of the genus, to complete the connotation of the species.
And since the definition of Man according to the ordinary connotation of the word, though it would have answered every other purpose of a definition, would not have pointed out the place which the species ought to occupy in that particular classification; he gave the word a special connotation, that he might be able to define it by the kind of attributes on which, for reasons of scientific convenience, he had resolved to found his division of animated nature.
One is forced to this constant comparison; the white man in the country is the only white man the Indian knows anything about. To the Indian a physical act is merely a physical act; all down his generations there has been no moral connotation therewith, and it is hard to change the point of view of ages when it affects personal indulgence so profoundly.
The words used may be the same, but the connotation, all the words imply and suggest, is, perhaps in very important respects, different, and requires a paraphrase, longer or shorter, to explain them. Take the word "false" in English and "falsch" in German.
The distinction is indeed so important that wholly different words man and woman, bull and cow stand for the best-known animals of different sex; while adjectives, where declension is extinct, as in English, often take on a connotation of gender and are applied to one sex only as we say a beautiful woman, but hardly a beautiful man.
Aristotle, for instance, points out sexual differences in the feet of the crawfish which were overlooked up to a short time ago. And Hesiod also insists upon the dragon's eyes. Yet it is significant that ophis, the snake, is derived, like drakon, from a root meaning nothing more than to perceive or regard. There is no connotation of ferocity in either of the words.
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