A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. II — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, 7th Edition, Vol. II
John Stuart Mill · en
But there is another reason, in addition to that of promoting
perspicuity, for giving a brief and compact name to each of the more
considerable results of abstraction which are obtained in the course of
our intellectual phenomena. By naming them, we fix our attention upon
them; we keep them more constantly before the mind. The names are
remembered, and being remembered, suggest their definition; while if
instead of specific and characteristic names, the meaning had been
expressed by putting together a number of other names, that particular
combination of words already in common use for other purposes would have
had nothing to make itself remembered by. If we want to render a
particular combination of ideas permanent in the mind, there is nothing
which clenches it like a name specially devoted to express it. If
mathematicians had been obliged to speak of "that to which a quantity,
in increasing or diminishing, is always approaching nearer, so that the
difference becomes less than any assignable quantity, but to which it
never becomes exactly equal," instead of expressing all this by the
simple phrase, "the limit of a quantity," we should probably have long
remained without most of the important truths which have been discovered
by means of the relation between quantities of various kinds and their
limits. If instead of speaking of _momentum_, it had been necessary to
say, "the product of the number of units of velocity in the velocity by
the number of units of mass in the mass," many of the dynamical truths
now apprehended by means of this complex idea would probably have
escaped notice, for want of recalling the idea itself with sufficient
readiness and familiarity. And on subjects less remote from the topics
of popular discussion, whoever wishes to draw attention to some new or
unfamiliar distinction among things, will find no way so sure as to
invent or select suitable names for the express purpose of marking it.
A volume devoted to explaining what the writer means by civilization,
does not raise so vivid a conception of it as the single expression,
that Civilization is a different thing from Cultivation; the compactness
of that brief designation for the contrasted quality being an equivalent
for a long discussion. So, if we would impress forcibly upon the
understanding and memory the distinction between the two different
conceptions of a representative government, we cannot more effectually
do so than by saying that Delegation is not Representation. Hardly any
original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among
mankind, or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their
inventors, until aptly-selected words or phrases have, as it were,
nailed them down and held them fast.