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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.
In this last case, again, we may either compose our definition of as many connotative names as there are attributes, each attribute being connoted by one, as, Man is a corporeal, organized, animated, rational being, shaped so and so; or we employ names which connote several of the attributes at once, as, Man is a rational animal, shaped so and so.
The names of feelings, like other concrete general names, are connotative; but they connote a mere resemblance. When predicated of any individual feeling, the information they convey is that of its likeness to the other feelings which we have been accustomed to call by the same name.
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.
Proper names are attached to the objects themselves, and are not dependent on the continuance of any attribute of the object. But there is another kind of names, which although they are individual names, that is, predicable only of one object, are really connotative.
His doctrine is a full explanation of such predications as these: Hyde was Clarendon, or, Tully is Cicero. It exhausts the meaning of those propositions. But it is a sadly inadequate theory of any others. It has been seen, however, that the meaning of all names, except proper names and that portion of the class of abstract names which are not connotative, resides in the connotation.
Now, an utterance has the quality of style when these two appeals of language the denotative and the connotative, the definite and the indefinite, the intellectual and the sensuous are so co-ordinated as to produce upon the reader or the listener an effect which is, not dual, but indissolubly single.
The turbulent voices, even Guy Pollock being connotative beside her, were nothing. She repeated: Deep on the convent-roof the snows Are sparkling to the moon. The words and the light blurred into one vast indefinite happiness, and she believed that some great thing was coming to her. She withdrew from the clamor into a worship of incomprehensible gods.
A definition is a proposition declaring either the special or the ordinary meaning, i.e. in the case of connotative names, the connotation, of a word. This may be effected by stating directly the attributes connoted; but it is more usual to predicate of the subject of definition one name of synonymous, or several which, when combined, are of equivalent, connotation.
This may be done either by predicating of the name intended to be defined, another connotative name exactly synonymous, as, “Man is a human being,” which is not commonly accounted a definition at all; or by predicating two or more connotative names, which make up among them the whole connotation of the name to be defined.
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