with Blumenbach, I am accustomed to call a negro an Ethiopian, when I apply this name to any representative of that race, I am performing the same mental act as my neighbour who calls him a Negro, or my child who calls him a Black-man. If it should be said that in all such cases the act of naming is so immediately due to association that no demand is made upon the powers of judgment, the admission would be a dangerous one for my opponents to make, since the same remark would apply to the full proposition, “That man is black.” Moreover, the objection admits of being easily disposed of by choosing instances of naming where associations have not yet been definitively fixed. If I am travelling in a strange continent, and amid all the unfamiliar flora there encountered I suddenly perceive a plant which I think I know, before I name it to my friend as that plant, I would submit it to close scrutiny—_i.e._ carefully _judge_ its resemblances to the known or familiar species. In short, all connotative names, when denominatively applied, betoken acts of judgment, which differ from those concerned in full predication only as regards the form of their expression. Or, as Mill very tersely remarks, “whenever the names given to objects convey any information, that is, whenever they have properly any meaning, the meaning resides not in what they denote, but in what they connote.” And although in his elaborate treatment of Names and Propositions he omits expressly to notice the point now before us, it is clearly implied in the above quotation. The point is that connotative names (or denominative terms)[99] are often in themselves of predicative value; and this point is clearly implied in the above quotation, because, whenever “names given to objects convey any information,” the information thus conveyed is virtually predicated: the “meaning” connoted by the name is affirmed in the mere act of bestowing the name, which thus in itself becomes a condensed proposition. “It is a truism of psychology that the terms of a proposition, when closely interrogated, turn out to be nothing but abbreviated judgments.”[100] This view of the matter, then, is the only one that can be countenanced by psychology. It is likewise the only one that can be countenanced by philology, or the study of language in the making. Of this fact I will adduce abundant evidence in a subsequent chapter, where it will be shown, as Professor Max Müller says, that “every name was originally a proposition.” But at present I am only concerned with one of the most elementary points of purely psychological analysis, and will therefore postpone the independent illumination of the whole philosophy of predication which of late years has been so splendidly furnished by the comparative study of languages.