the institution of nouns substantive, would probably be one of the first steps towards the formation of language. Two savages who had never been taught to speak, but had been bred up remote from the societies of men, would naturally begin to form that language by which they would endeavour to make their mutual wants intelligible to each other, by uttering certain sounds, whenever they meant to denote certain objects. Those objects only which were most familiar to them, and which they had most frequent occasion to mention, would have particular names assigned to them. The particular cave whose covering sheltered them from the weather, the particular tree whose fruit relieved their hunger, the particular fountain whose water allayed their thirst, would first be denominated by the words cave, tree, fountain, or by whatever other appellations they might think proper, in that primitive jargon, to mark them. Afterwards, when the more enlarged experience of these savages had led them to observe, and their necessary occasions obliged them to make mention of other caves, and other trees, and other fountains, they would naturally bestow upon each of those new objects the same name by which they had been accustomed to express the similar object they were first acquainted with. The new objects had none of them any name of its own, but each of them exactly resembled another object which had such an appellation. It was impossible that those savages could behold the new objects without recollecting the old ones; and the name of the old ones, to which the new bore so close a resemblance. When they had occasion, therefore, to mention, or to point out to each other, any of the new objects, they would naturally utter the name of the correspondent old one, of which the idea could not fail, at that instant, to present itself to their memory in the strongest and liveliest manner. And thus, those words, which were originally the proper names of individuals, would each of them insensibly become the common name of a multitude. A child that is just learning to speak, calls every person who comes to the house its papa or its mamma; and thus bestows upon the whole species those names which it had been taught to apply to two individuals. I have known a clown, who did not know the proper name of the river which ran by his own door. It was the river, he said, and he never heard any other name for it. His experience, it seems, had not led him to observe any other river. The general word river, therefore, was, it is evident, in his acceptance of it, a proper name, signifying an individual object. If this person had been carried to another river, would he not readily have called it a river? Could we suppose any person living on the banks of the Thames so ignorant, as not to know the general word river, but to be acquainted only with the particular word Thames, if he was brought to any other river, would he not readily call it a Thames? This, in reality, is no more than what they, who are well acquainted with the general word, are very apt to do. An Englishman, describing any great river which he may have seen in some foreign country, naturally says, that it is another Thames. The Spaniards, when they first arrived upon the coast of Mexico, and observed the wealth, populousness, and habitations of that fine country, so much superior to the savage nations which they had been visiting for some time before, cried out, that it was another Spain. Hence it was called New Spain, and this name has stuck to that unfortunate country ever since. We say, in the same manner, of a hero, that he is an Alexander; of an orator, that he is a Cicero; of a philosopher, that he is a Newton. This way of speaking, which the grammari

ans call an Antonomasia, and which is still extremely common, though now not at all necessary, demonstrates how much mankind are naturally disposed to give to one object the name of any other which nearly resembles it, and thus to denominate a multitude, by what originally was intended to express an individual.

"It is this application of the name of an individual to a great multitude of objects, whose resemblance naturally recalls the idea of that individual, and of the name which expresses it, that seems originally to have given occasion to the formation of those classes and assortments, which, in the schools, are called genera and species."*

That the first designation of species and genera, by appellatives, was nothing more than this ingenious speculation supposes it to have been,-the extension of mere proper names, from similar objects to similar objects, I have very little doubt. But still it must be remembered, that the extension was from similar objects, to objects felt to be similar, that, before the extension, therefore, there must have been a general notion of the circumstances of resemblance,-and, that, without this intermediate feeling of his mind, the savage would as little have thought of calling one tree by the name which he had previously given to another tree, as he would have thought of extending this name to the cave which sheltered him, or the fountain at which he quenched his thirst. In short, whatever our theory of the origin of general terms may be, it either must take for granted the previous existence of general relative notions, corresponding with them, or it must suppose that the terms were invented at random, without any reason whatever, to guide us in our application or limitation of them. To state any reason of this kind, is to state some general resemblance, that is felt by us, and consequently some notion of general circumstances of resemblance which must be independent of the general term, because it is prior to it. This, which the Nominalist on reflection, I should conceive, must admit, is all for which the Conceptualist contends, or at least, is all for which I contend, in that view of the generalizing process which I have given you.

The decision of the controversy, might, indeed, as I have now said, be very safely trusted to the Nominalist himself, if he would only put a single question to his own mind, and reflect for a few moments before giving an answer. Why do I class together certain objects, and exclude certain others, from the class which I have formed? He must say, either that he classes them together, because he has classed them together, and that he excludes the others because he excludes them, which is surely not a very philosophic answer, though it is all which can be understood in the assertion, that it is the name which constitutes, as well as defines the genus; or he must say, that there is some reason which has led him to give the general name to certain objects, and not to certain others. The reason for which the name is given, must, of course, be something which is felt, prior to the giving of the name, and independent of it; and the only reason which can be conceived is, that certain objects have a resemblance which certain other objects do not partake, and that the general name is therefore invented to express the objects which agree in exciting this common notion of relation. Before the name was invented, therefore, there must have been a feeling of circumstances of resemblance, common to certain individuals,—a feeling, *Smith's Considerations concerning the First Formation of Languages, from the beginzing;

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which is neither the perception that precedes it, nor the name which follows it, but a state of mind intervening between the perception of the separate objects, and the verbal designation of them as a species or genus. In short, it is that general relative suggestion, or general notion of resemblance, on which we must admit our classifications to be founded, or contend that they are founded upon nothing.

Since all reasoning implies some generalization, the Nominalist, who allows nothing general but terms, is, of course, led, or forced, by his theory, to deny the possibility of reasoning of any kind, without the aid of general terms; a denial which seems to me one of the boldest, because the least consistent with the observed facts which it is possible either for dogmatism or scepticism to make; as if the infant, long before he can be supposed to have acquired any knowledge of terms, did not form his little reasonings on the subjects, on which it is important for him to reason, as accurately probably as afterwards; but, at least, with all the accuracy which is necessary for preserving his existence, and gratifying his few feeble desires. He has, indeed, even then, gone through processes, which are admitted to involve the finest reasoning, by those very philosophers who deny him to be capable of reasoning at all. He has already calculated distances, long before he knew the use of a single word expressive of distance, and accommodated his induction to those general laws of matter, of which he knows nothing but the simple facts, and his expectation, that what has afforded him either pain or pleasure, will continue to afford him pain or pleasure. What language does the infant require, to prevent him from putting his finger twice in the flame of that candle which has burned him once? or to persuade him to stretch his hand in exact conformity with the laws of optics, to that very point at which some bright trinket is glittering on his delighted eyes? To suppose that we cannot reason without language, seems to me, indeed, almost to involve the same inconsistency, as to say, that man is incapable of moving his limbs, till he have previously walked a mile.

The use of general terms is not to enable man to reason, but to enable him to reason well. They fix the steps of our progress, they give us the power of availing ourselves, with confidence, of our own past reasonings, and of the reasonings of others, they do not absolutely prevent us from wandering, but they prevent us from wandering very far, and are marks of direction, to which we can return; without them, we should be like travellers, journeying on an mmense plain, without a track, and without any points on the sky, to determine whether we were continuing to move east or west, or north or south. We should still be moving, indeed, and each step would be a progress, if it were compared merely with the step that went before. But there could be no long journey onwards; and, after years of wandering, we might, perhaps, return to the very spot from which we set out, without even so much knowledge, as to have the slightest guess, that we were again where we had been before.

To drop this allegory, however, it is very evident, that, though we should be capable of reasoning, even without language of any sort, and of reasoning sufficient to protect ourselves from obvious and familiar causes of injury, our reasonings, in such circumstances, must be very limited, and as little comparable to the reasoning of him who enjoys the advantage of all the new distinctions of a refined language, as the creeping of the diminutive insect to the soaring of the eagle. Both animals, indeed, are capable of advancing;

-but the one passes from cloud to cloud, almost with the rapidity of the lightning, which is afterwards to flash from them, and the other takes half a day, to move over the few shrunk fibres of a withered leaf.

What must be the arithmetic of that people in South America, of whom Condamine tells us, whose whole numeration did not extend beyond three, and who had no resource afterwards, but to point first to their fingers and then to their hair! What the reasonings of arithmetic would be to such a people, every other species of reasoning would be to us, if our general vocabulary bore no greater proportion to the feelings that were to be expressed by it, than this very limited numeral vocabulary, to all the possible combinations of numbers.

The extent of error into which we should be likely to fall, in our classifications and reasonings in general, if our language were of this very imperfect kind, it is, of course, impossible for us, in our present circumstances, to guess; though we may derive some assistance, in our estimation of these possible absurdities, from facts of which voyagers occasionally tell us. I may take for an example a fact mentioned by Captain Cook, in describing the people of Wateeoo, a small island, on which he lighted in his voyage from New Zealand to the Friendly Islands. "The inhabitants," he says, "were afraid to come near our cows and horses, nor did they form the least conception of their nature. But the sheep and goats did not surpass the limits of their ideas; for they gave us to understand, that they knew them to be birds.""It will appear rather incredible," he adds, "that human ignorance could ever make so strange a mistake; there not being the most distant similitude between a sheep or goat and any winged animal. But these people seemed to know nothing of the existence of any other land animals besides hogs, dogs, and birds. Our sheep and goats, they could see, were very different creatures from the two first; and therefore, they inferred, that they must belong to the latter class, in which they knew that there is a considerable variety of species."-"I would add," says Mr. Stewart, who quotes this very striking fact, together with the judicious remark of Cook," I would add, that the mistake of these islanders, perhaps, did not arise from their considering a sheep or goat, as bearing a more striking resemblance to a bird than to the two classes of quadrupeds with which they were acquainted, but from the want of a generic word, such as quadruped, comprehending these two species; which men in their situation would no more be led to form, than a person who had seen only one individual of each species would think of an appellative to express both, instead of applying a proper name to each. In consequence of the variety of birds, it appears that they had a generic Dame comprehending all of them, to which it was not unnatural for them to refer any new animal they met with."*

The observation of Mr. Stewart, with respect to the influence of a generic name on this seemingly very strange arrangement of these very rude zoologists, is ingenious and just. It must be remembered, however, in opposition to his general doctrine on the subject, that the application of the generic term, even in this very strange manner, is a proof, not that we are without general notions, but that we truly have general notions, that are independent of the mere terms which express them. It was not merely because they had a generic term that they extended this term to the unknown sheep and goats, but because the sheep and goats coincided, in some measure, with the geneStewart's Elements, Part II. civ. sect. 1.

ral notion expressed by the general term. Of this the most striking evidence is contained in the very statement of Captain Cook. The cows and horses, sheep and goats, were all equally unknown to the islanders. Why, then, did they not class the cows and horses with birds as much as the goats and sheep? As far as the mere possession of a generic word could have led to this application,-if a word alone were necessary, it was common to all the new cases alike. When all these were equally unknown, there must have been some previous general notion of certain circumstances of resemblance in birds, with which the goats and sheep coincided more exactly than the cows and horses. Nor is it very difficult to guess what this previous notion was, the bulk of the different animals must have led to the distinction. The winged tribes with which they were acquainted, though they might perhaps approach, in some slight degree, to the stature of the smaller quadru peds, could have no resemblance in this respect to the horses and cows. A bird, in their mental definition of it, was certainly a living thing, of certain various sizes familiar to them, and not a dog or a hog. A sheep, or a gost, was seen by them to be a living thing, not a dog nor a hog, and of a size that implied no remarkable opposition to that involved in their silent, mental definition of a bird. In such circumstances, it was classed by them as a bird, with as much accuracy as is to be found in many of our systematic references, even in the present improved state of science and natural history,-in that, for example, which classes and ranks under one word, the whale that swims with the man that walks; or, to use a case still more analogous, even the ant that creeps with the gnat that flies, and, with equal accuracy, they excluded the cows and horses that did not coincide with the general notion, of which a certain resemblance of size formed an essential part. The extension of the term to the one set of quadrupeds, and the exclusion of the other set, must have had some reason; and this reason, whatever it may have been, must have been some general feeling of resemblance of some sort,—a relative suggestion, intervening between the perception of the animals, and the application of the term.

LECTURE XLVIII.

ANALYSIS OF THE PROCESS OF REASONING.

GENTLEMEN, my last Lecture brought to a conclusion the remarks which I had to offer on that very interesting tribe of our suggestions of relation which constitute the feelings of resemblance, a tribe, on the existence of which, as we have seen, all classification depends, and in a great measure the whole power of language, as an instrument or medium either of distinct thought in the mind or the individual, or of reciprocal communication of thought from mind to mind.

The examination of this species of relation, led us into one of the most memorable controversies in the whole science of Intellectual Philosophy; and though I knew well that there could be no reason to fear your adoption