A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. I
John Stuart Mill · en
In regard to such names of attributes as are connotative, and express
attributes of those attributes, there is no difficulty: like other
connotative names they are defined by declaring their connotation. Thus,
the word _fault_ may be defined, "a quality productive of evil or
inconvenience." Sometimes, again, the attribute to be defined is not one
attribute, but an union of several: we have only, therefore, to put
together the names of all the attributes taken separately, and we obtain
the definition of the name which belongs to them all taken together; a
definition which will correspond exactly to that of the corresponding
concrete name. For, as we define a concrete name by enumerating the
attributes which it connotes, and as the attributes connoted by a
concrete name form the entire signification of the corresponding
abstract name, the same enumeration will serve for the definition of
both. Thus, if the definition of _a human being_ be this, "a being,
corporeal, animated, rational, shaped so and so," the definition of
_humanity_ will be corporeity and animal life, combined with
rationality, and with such and such a shape.
When, on the other hand, the abstract name does not express a
complication of attributes, but a single attribute, we must remember
that every attribute is grounded on some fact or phenomenon, from which,
and which alone, it derives its meaning. To that fact or phenomenon,
called in a former chapter the foundation of the attribute, we must,
therefore, have recourse for its definition. Now, the foundation of the
attribute may be a phenomenon of any degree of complexity, consisting of
many different parts, either coexistent or in succession. To obtain a
definition of the attribute, we must analyse the phenomenon into these
parts. Eloquence, for example, is the name of one attribute only; but
this attribute is grounded on external effects of a complicated nature,
flowing from acts of the person to whom we ascribed the attribute; and
by resolving this phenomenon of causation into its two parts, the cause
and the effect, we obtain a definition of eloquence, viz. the power of
influencing the feelings by speech or writing.