(5) If two or more terms happen to be exactly synonymous, it may be possible (and, if so, it is a service to the language) to divert one of them to any neighbouring meaning that has no determinate expression. Thus, Wordsworth and Coleridge took great pains to distinguish between Imagination and Fancy, which had become in common usage practically equivalent; and they sought to limit 'imagination' to an order of poetic effect, which (they said) had prevailed during the Elizabethan age, but had been almost lost during the Gallo-classic, and which it was their mission to restore. Co-ordinate terms often tend to coalesce and become synonymous, or one almost supersedes the other, to the consequent impoverishment of our speech. At present _proposition_ (that something is the fact) has almost driven out _proposal_ (that it is desirable to co-operate in some action). Even good writers and speakers, by their own practice, encourage this confusion: they submit to Parliament certain 'propositions' (proposals for legislation), or even make 'a proposition of marriage.' Definition should counteract such a tendency. (6) We must avoid the temptation to extend the denotation of a word so far as to diminish or destroy its connotation; or to increase its connotation so much as to render it no longer applicable to things which it formerly denoted: we should neither unduly generalise, nor unduly specialise, a term. Is it desirable to define _education_ so as to include the 'lessons of experience'; or is it better to restrict it as implying a personal educator? If any word implies blame or praise, we are apt to extend it to everything we hate or approve. But _coward_ cannot be so defined as to include all bullies, nor _noble_ so as to include every honest man, without some loss in distinctness of thought. The same impulses make us specialise words; for, if two words express approval, we wish to apply both to whatever we admire and to refuse both to whatever displeases us. Thus, a man may resolve to call no one great who is not good: greatness, according to him, connotes goodness: whence it follows that (say) Napoleon I. was not great. Another man is disgusted with greatness: according to him, good and great are mutually exclusive classes, sheep and goats, as in Gray's wretched clench: "Beneath the good how far, yet far above the great." In feet, however 'good' and 'great' are descriptive terms, sometimes applicable to the same object, sometimes to different: but 'great' is the wider term and applicable to goodness itself and also to badness; whereas by making 'great' connote goodness it becomes the narrower term. And as we have seen (§ 3), such epithets may be applicable to objects on account of different qualities: _good_ is not predicated on the same ground of a man and of a horse.