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In the case of connotative names, the meaning, as has been so often observed, is the connotation; and the definition of a connotative name, is the proposition which declares its connotation. This may be done either directly or indirectly.
In the former, a connotative name is defined by a part only of its connotation; in the latter, by something which forms no part of the connotation at all. An example of the first kind of imperfect definitions is the following: Man is a rational animal.
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.
But it is easy to produce words which are real instances of connotative individual names. For, although it is conceivable that more persons than one might have participated in the authorship of the Iliad, or in the murder of Henri Quatre, the employment of the article the implies that, in fact, this was not the case.
In the case of connotative names, the meaning, as has been so often observed, is the connotation; and the definition of a connotative name, is the proposition which declares its connotation. This might be done either directly or indirectly. This form of definition is the most precise and least equivocal of any; but it is not brief enough, and is besides too technical for common discourse.
It is evident that these words, when concrete, are, like other concrete general names, connotative; they denote a subject, and connote an attribute; and each of them has, or might have, a corresponding abstract name, to denote the attribute connoted by the concrete.
Connotative names, therefore, were, after proper names, the first which were used: and in the simpler cases, no doubt, a distinct connotation was present to the minds of those who first used the name, and was distinctly intended by them to be conveyed by it.
This desirable purpose, of giving a fixed connotation where it is wanting, is the end aimed at whenever any one attempts to give a definition of a general name already in use; every definition of a connotative name being an attempt either merely to declare, or to declare and analyze, the connotation of the name.
If we now suppose the subject also to be a connotative name, the meaning expressed by the proposition has advanced a step further in complication. But the characteristic of this case is, that the objects are no longer individually designated.
But it is a name applied to all of them in consequence of an attribute which they are supposed to possess in common, the attribute which has received the name of virtue. It is applied to all beings that are considered to possess this attribute; and to none which are not so considered. All concrete general names are connotative.
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