A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. I — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. I
John Stuart Mill · en
When it is impossible to obtain good tools, the next best thing is to
understand thoroughly the defects of those we have. I have therefore
warned the reader of the ambiguity of the names which, for want of
better, I am necessitated to employ. It must now be the writer's
endeavour so to employ them as in no case to leave the meaning doubtful
or obscure. No one of the above terms being altogether unambiguous, I
shall not confine myself to any one, but shall employ on each occasion
the word which seems least likely in the particular case to lead to
misunderstanding; nor do I pretend to use either these or any other
words with a rigorous adherence to one single sense. To do so would
often leave us without a word to express what is signified by a known
word in some one or other of its senses: unless authors had an unlimited
licence to coin new words, together with (what it would be more
difficult to assume) unlimited power of making readers understand them.
Nor would it be wise in a writer, on a subject involving so much of
abstraction, to deny himself the advantage derived from even an improper
use of a term, when, by means of it, some familiar association is called
up which brings the meaning home to the mind, as it were by a flash.
The difficulty both to the writer and reader, of the attempt which must
be made to use vague words so as to convey a precise meaning, is not
wholly a matter of regret. It is not unfitting that logical treatises
should afford an example of that, to facilitate which is among the most
important uses of logic. Philosophical language will for a long time,
and popular language still longer, retain so much of vagueness and
ambiguity, that logic would be of little value if it did not, among its
other advantages, exercise the understanding in doing its work neatly
and correctly with these imperfect tools.
After this preamble it is time to proceed to our enumeration. We shall
commence with Feelings, the simplest class of nameable things; the term
Feeling being of course understood in its most enlarged sense.
I. FEELINGS, OR STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS.