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Updated: May 26, 2025
The question never arose, and they were never called upon to decide how such a case would have affected their notion of essentiality. However this may be, they were satisfied with taking such a portion of the differentia as sufficed to distinguish the species from all other existing things, though by so doing they might not exhaust the connotation of the name.
These are a division of general names, not based on a distinction in their meaning, i.e. in the attributes connoted, but on a distinction in the class denoted. The Aristotelians said that the differentia must be of the essence of the subject. They vaguely understood, indeed, by the essence of a thing, that which makes it the kind of thing that it is.
As our review of what may be called totemistic features shows, the one permanent element in the relation between men and nonhuman, nondivine objects is reverence for these last on men's part; and the conception of an alliance, defensive and offensive, between the two groups has been proposed above as an additional differentia of totemism, a sense of kinship being involved.
The Old Testament is the story of the prolonged effort to keep Jehovah in His supreme place. To make and to succeed in that effort was the differentia, of Israel.
The distinction, therefore, between Differentia, Proprium, and Accidens, is not grounded in the nature of things, but in the connotation of names; and we must seek it there, if we wish to find what it is.
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.
Differentia being seldom taken to mean the whole of the peculiarities constitutive of the species, but some one of those peculiarities only, a complete definition would be per genus et differentias, rather than differentiam.
It was no longer enough, as in the old days, to feel the charm and incantation of a line or a word; he wished to penetrate the secret, to understand something of the wonderful suggestion, all apart from the sense, that seemed to him the differentia of literature, as distinguished from the long follies of "character-drawing," "psychological analysis," and all the stuff that went to make the three-volume novel of commerce.
But in the present case there are not so many well-substantiated differentia at the disposal of the student, and it does not appear so clearly that the "higher" races are furthest from the lower primates and lower mammalia as regards their mental processes.
This, therefore, is another of the attributes by which the species man is distinguished from other species of the same genus: would this attribute serve equally well for a differentia? The Aristotelians say No; having laid it down that the differentia must, like the genus and species, be of the essence of the subject.
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