We ought, if possible, to define in consonance with the denotation. But sometimes this is impossible, through the name having accumulated _transitive_ applications, in its gradual extension from one object, in relation to which it connotes one property, to another which resembles the former, but in quite a different attribute. These _transitive_ applications, even when found to correspond in different languages, may have arisen, not from any common quality in the objects, but from some association of ideas founded on the common nature and condition of mankind. When the association is so natural and habitual as to become virtually indissoluble, the _transitive_ meanings are apt to coalesce in one complex conception; and every new transition becomes a more comprehensive generalisation of the term in question. In such cases the ancients and schoolmen did not suspect, what otherwise they carefully watched for, viz. ambiguities: not Plato, though his Comparisons and Abstractions preparatory to Induction are perfect; not even Bacon, in his speculations on Heat. Hence have sprung the various vain attempts to trace a common idea in all the uses of a word, such as _Cause_ (Efficient, Material, Formal, and Final _Cause_), _the Good_, _the Fit_. When a term is applied to many different objects agreeing _all_ only in _one_ quality (e.g. things _beautiful_, in _agreeableness_), though _most_ agree in something besides, it is better to exclude part of the denotation than of the connotation, however indistinct: else language ceases to keep alive old experience, alien perhaps to present tendencies. In any case, words are always in danger of losing part of their connotation. For, just one or two out of a complex cluster of ideas, and sometimes merely the look or sound of the word itself, is often all that is absolutely necessary for the suggesting another set of ideas to continue the process of thought; and consequently, some metaphysicians have even fancied that all reasoning is but the mechanical use of terms according to a certain form. If persons be not of active imaginations, the only antidote against the propensity to let slip the connotation of names, is the habit of predicating of them the properties connoted; though even the propositions themselves, as may be seen from the way in which maxims of Religion, Ethics, and Politics are used, are often repeated merely mechanically, not being questioned, but also not being felt. Much of our knowledge recorded in words is ever oscillating between its tendency, in consequence of different generations attending exclusively to different properties in names, to become partially dormant, and the counter-efforts of individuals, at times, to revive it by tracing the forgotten properties historically in the almost mechanically repeated formulas of propositions; and, when they have been there rediscovered, promulgating them, not as discoveries, but with authority as what men still profess to believe.