CHAPTER 4

134. I have already dealt briefly with it; all major philosophers have come up against the difficulty, a kind of reef encountered on their philosophical voyage.
This is how great problems are always solved; a great problem is merely a great difficulty to overcome. However, we should not think that philosophers freely set themselves difficulties as though they already knew or had an inkling of them all, and could choose to deal with one rather than another, and to make one problem the subject of their thinking rather than another. If difficult problems were not resolved for many centuries, this was due not to their intrinsic complexity but to ignorance of it. When a problem is put forward for investigation by the human mind, we can say that it is already half solved. At times, it is brought to the attention of thinkers purely by chance. Mathematics, for example, owes the theory of isochronal arcs to Galileo's observation of a swinging lamp, and the theory of universal gravity to the falling of an apple on Newton's head.
However, merely to submit difficulties to human attention is not in itself enough to ensure a solution; they have to be properly presented. The length of time taken to solve them is to be attributed in the main to the time that has to elapse before the state of the question is outlined simply, fully and directly to the mind. Difficulties cannot be pondered indirectly while the mind is thinking about something else.

Our difficulty is a case in point. Almost every philosopher came across it, almost every one of them passed over it because it was not the direct object of their consideration. Most of them saw it only by chance and under an accidental form.
I say this because it offers a legitimate excuse and defence for them. If they had been able to formulate the difficulty as clearly as we can, thanks to their work, they would have solved it as easily as we can.

135. Let me sum up the various accidental occasions, already dealt with, which brought our difficulty to the attention of modern philosophers.
Locke came up against it when he was obliged to deal with the idea of substance and when, in trying to define the term knowledge, he realised that he had to bring judgments into play. Condillac came very close to it when he had to distinguish between ideas and sensations, and deal with general ideas. Reid, in his attempt to explain our persuasion about the existence of bodies, realised that Locke was wrong in taking our acquired ideas as the starting point of the development of our spirit; before we acquire ideas, we have to posit a primal, natural judgment. How did Dugald Stewart, until recently a pillar of the very worthy Scottish school, see the problem? He too gets close to it, but does not see it clearly, when he tries to explain how we can form general ideas when naming things. Let us see what happens to him.

136. Stewart, in the chapter of his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind where he deals with the faculty of abstraction, quotes a passage from Adam Smith's essay, Considerations concerning the first Formation of Languages. As it contains the main argument of his theory of abstraction, I shall quote it here.

Smith adds:

137. At first sight, it would seem that the explanation given for the formation of the ideas of genera and species is extremely easy and natural. Actually, the error and insufficiency in this explanation are impossible to find without careful examination. On thorough examination, however, the explanation is found to be deceptive and misleading, unsound and false. In my view, it is one of those explanations which offer undiscerning readers an attractive argument distracting them from the study of the individual sections comprising it. The readers to whom I refer, considering the whole approach to be fair and honest, accept the truth of its contents. They do not bother to distinguish the ideas which their favourable disposition leads them to accept on trust as reliable and accurate. Previous experience, however, has often shown me willy-nilly that arguments which seem plausible conceal disastrous errors leading to a long series of similarly disastrous results. I feel justified, therefore, and even obliged to investigate the argument fully before accepting it.

138. I note first in the passage quoted from Smith, that common nouns are mentioned as though they were all of the same type. There are, however, many types of common noun, and I need to investigate whether it is exact to refer to them without specifying their various species and whether the argument holds good for all species or for one particular species.
The concept of common noun which the passage puts forward is that of a group of individuals. Let us first see, therefore, whether this applies to all species of common noun or whether, strictly speaking, all the nouns referring to a group of individuals are common.
The first species of nouns used to refer to a group of individuals consists of numerals, two, three, four, five, and so on. Ignoring the abstraction involved whereby they cannot refer to a species of individuals without some mention of the group referred to - for example, two, three, four, five men - let us consider them in so far as they have the power to represent for us a group of individuals.
When I speak of ten men, ten towns, and so on, I am certainly referring to a group of individuals, but cannot say that the number ten is common to each town or each man. It is not true, therefore, that all nouns referring to a group of individuals can be called common. This is used only when it can be applied to each one of a number of individuals.(107)
Numerical nouns, therefore, are a species which express not only a group, but in addition the number of members contained by the group. They express its size in numerical terms. A number does not express an indeterminate group of individuals but determines the group by establishing its number.

139. A second species of nouns, referring to a group of individuals, are those which, in naming a group, do not accurately determine its limits but indicate its extent in a general way. Examples are few, some, many, too many, and so on, which are all applied to groups of individuals although they cannot be called common because they cannot be associated with each individual member of the group.

A third species of nouns represents groups but without expressing the number of their individual members or their quality relative to many or few. This quality is, however, associated with some idea such as people, tribe, assembly, family, and so on, all of which are nouns referring to groups of individuals. These nouns, although they do not express the numbers contained in the groups, do nevertheless indicate a relative numerical size by the various ideas which they join and to which they refer. Thus, although family tells us neither the exact number of its constituent members nor whether they are few or many, the term refers to a group of individuals smaller than the one suggested by the word nation. Nor can these nouns, although they indicate a group of individuals, be called common because they are not applicable to the individual members which make up the group.

140. All plural nouns are nouns referring to groups of individuals. They form a fourth class which in no way specifies their numerical character. Thus, in saying men, animals, houses etc., we are referring rather to a group of these different species of things but without indicating the number of individuals contained in the groups. Nor are these nouns common to a number of individuals; they merely express groups of totally indeterminate number.
We ought to dwell for a while on this lack of determination, but to avoid breaking the series of nouns, let us at this stage continue to list their different classes and see which can easily be confused with the genus of common nouns.

141. Some nouns do not refer to individuals but to their essential or accidental qualities considered in isolation from the other features making up the individual. This is an indisputable and glaringly obvious fact. For example: humanity, animality, and so on, refer to essential qualities; whiteness, hardness, fluidity, and so on, refer to accidental qualities.
These nouns may be called general because they refer not to individuals but to qualities common to many individuals. Nevertheless, they still cannot be called common because they are nouns indicating single qualities found in many individuals, not nouns common to several individuals.

This becomes very evident when we consider the singular characteristic which distinguishes and separates them from all other nouns: they may never be used in the plural. Each of these nouns expresses a single, abstract, entirely simple thing(108) which because it cannot be confused with any other, is unique and indivisible. Thus it would be incorrect and imprecise to say humanities, animalities, whitenesses, and so on, in the plural. These nouns are not used for a number of individuals but solely for a single characteristic of a number of individuals. Consequently, they do not stand for any group of individuals, nor can they be called common but merely general or abstract.

142. From these nouns or - to put it more accurately - from the idea to which these nouns refer,(109) we derive the nouns which we can rightly refer to as common because they relate to a number of individuals. Examples of these are: man, animal, plant, cave, tree, spring, and so on, and adjectives such as white, hard, etc., which may be taken purely as adjectives or used elliptically to stand for nouns understood implicitly.
In analysing the value of these nouns, we have to take great care not to be led astray by the subtlety of modern languages. We are always inclined to think that a single idea has a corresponding single word, which is not the case. Words which express a single idea rather than a complex of ideas are exceedingly rare. The nature of language, and especially of modern languages, is such that we can with one word express an extremely complex idea, that is, an idea made up of a number of others. Not only do we express all those ideas but, at the same time, the link between them which binds them into a single unit. Hence, when we have analysed the meaning of a word, we can often break it down into one and even a number of propositions.

The same applies to the nouns to which I am referring; the noun 'man', for example, is equivalent to this proposition, 'an ens with humanity'; the noun 'tree': 'an ens having the characteristics which make up a tree. (If this had to be associated with a word not found in our language, we would speak of treeness)'. The same thing can be said about all other nouns of a similar genus. These nouns attribute to entia qualities which belong to them. They contain, therefore, a covert judgment by means of which, in uttering them or thinking of them, we attribute a predicate to a subject and for the sake of brevity express our operation in a single word which provides us with the result of the operation. It explicitly presents us with the connection we have discovered between predicate and subject. These are, properly speaking, the only common nouns because they apply to each individual member of a certain class. Thus, the word man applies to each man; tree applies to any one of all existing trees; cave applies to any cave regardless of type. The same can be said about all other nouns of this kind.

143. However, if the common being of a noun merely means its characteristic for expressing one individual at a time, the individual can be anyone of those possessing the quality indicated by the noun. Smith's assertion that each of these common nouns refers to a group of individuals is totally untrue and inaccurate. On the contrary, every common noun refers in every case to a single individual, but by means of a characteristic common to a number of individuals. This explains how the same noun can be applied first to one individual, then to another, and another, and thus in succession to each of those individuals which have the quality referred to in the noun. If it were true that the word tree referred to a group of trees, we would, by using it in the plural (by saying trees), have to express many groups of trees. This, however, is unheard of; no one has ever thought of expressing a number of groups of trees with this kind of plural, but only several individual trees.

144. Note how cautious we should be about Smith's argument when we are faced with so many mistakes in such a few sentences.(110) At first sight, the argument looked so attractive, and almost compelled our assent. It seemed intended solely to describe a perfectly natural and inevitable fact.
The assertion is that common nouns merely express groups of individuals. But I listed all the four species of nouns which express groups of individuals and found not one of them common to several individuals. I then examined general and abstract nouns which refer to either essential or accidental single qualities. None of these can be called common. They are proper nouns with a common quality.

Finally, from such abstract nouns or, to put it more accurately, from the ideas they represent, I showed how common nouns were derived. I discovered their nature which consists entirely in expressing a judgment by which a quality is assigned to a subject, that is, in identifying an object by the quality which indicates or distinguishes it. Because this is common to many subjects, it ensures that the noun itself is suitable for each of those things possessing the same quality. But let us press on.

145. Now that we know what the nature of common nouns is, let us examine that of proper nouns.
Both refer to individuals, but with this difference: when the common noun refers to an individual, it indicates and distinguishes it by one of its qualities. On the other hand, the proper noun does not indicate and distinguish the individual by one of its qualities, but directly names the individual itself and, so to speak, its individuality which, however, cannot be communicated from one individual to another. The word 'individual' expresses what is proper and exclusive to an ens - that which makes it what it is and nothing else. Consequently, a proper noun may be applied only to a single individual because, as I said, it expresses that which makes the ens single and unique. On the other hand, a common noun, by indicating the ens by means of a quality which can be found in many other entia, does not indicate it accurately enough to distinguish and separate it from all the others. As a result, a common noun, while applying to an individual, can also apply to any other ens which possesses the same quality to which the noun refers and is related. Thus, man refers to an individual man, not many men. But by indicating man through a common quality, humanity, it does not indicate him in such a way that he is distinguished and separated by this sign alone from all other men. In fact, given the nature of this noun, I may be led to think indiscriminately about this man or any other man. On the other hand, if I say that the man is called Peter, I have marked him off from all other men because the name, Peter, is not derived from a common quality but taken to indicate directly that individuality through which Peter has his own proper being, distinct from and incommunicable with all others.

146. Having clarified the terms proper noun and common noun, let us look more closely at Smith's argument.
I assign a proper noun to an ens to indicate its individuality. However, as this noun has no necessary connection with this individuality, I can still use the noun to indicate the individuality of another ens different from that to which I first gave the name.
That, in fact, is what happens. If a father has twelve sons, he can call them all in turn by the proper name "Peter". Moreover, if all the people alive today christened Peter were to meet, we would have not twelve but hundreds of persons named Peter. But granted that the name Peter has been given to such a large number of people, it does not follow that it can be called a common noun. It has remained the proper noun it was even though, in fact, it has been attributed to so many people. The reason is obvious. The status of proper noun or common noun does not depend on the fact that the name (noun) is given by him to a single individual or a number of them. It depends on how the name is given to them. If they are named by marking them off as having a common characteristic, as for instance by the word man, which assigns humanity to men, it is a common noun. If, however, they are named without attributing to them a common characteristic but strictly as individuals without any other connection between the noun and the individuals than the one given arbitrarily by the person who coined the noun, the noun is a proper one. Thus, even if all men were called Peter, the only consequence of this would be that each person would have two names, that is, the name of man which would be common and that of Peter which would be proper. As a matter of fact, even today, each person usually has two names, a common one and a proper one; it is purely accidental whether the proper names are different or the same, since even a single name would suffice. Actually, the number of proper nouns is very small compared to the number of people in the world.

147. This reveals another error in Smith's argument. He says that the savage changes proper into common nouns merely by applying them to a number of individuals, without giving any further explanation. The proper name, it would seem, becomes common merely through its extension to a number of individuals. But this is certainly not the case. Even if the name Peter were extended, as I said, to everyone, it would still be a proper name because it would refer to people not according to their common quality, but according to the individuality proper to each.
Let us assume that the savage had given a proper name to the first known cave where he had sheltered from the weather, to the first tree whose fruit he had eaten, and to the first spring which had quenched his thirst. Let us assume also that he then saw one, two, three similar caves, and one, two, three similar trees and streams and that finally he gave these new caves, trees and springs the same name as the first. We now have four caves, four trees and four springs, all bearing the same name.

At this stage, it still remains to be seen whether the savage who applies this single name to four similar things applies it to them as a proper or as a common name. In neither case can it be said that the name by which he called each of the four caves, the four trees or the four springs indicates groups of individuals, as Smith claims. The names would not, in fact, indicate anything other than one of the four, particular caves, trees or springs. It would still not be a collective noun until the nouns were made plural and one could say, caves, trees, springs instead of cave, tree, spring. There would be only one difference between the savage's giving the names as common or proper to the four individual things. If common, they would indicate the individual things by their common qualities, that is, by the qualities embodied in the concept of cave, tree, spring; if proper, they would indicate each of the four caves, trees and springs not by their qualities but in themselves as individual things. The names would be arbitrarily selected without any connection between the noun and the nature of the thing.

148. In my view, it is more likely that the names given by the savage to his tree, his cave, his spring were common from the very beginning.
Note that we do not, as a rule, give proper names to objects such as those we are discussing, that is, caves, trees, springs, and so on. Rather we are inclined to give proper names to persons, places, rivers and so on in order not to confuse them. Normally there is not the same need to bestow an individual proper name upon a tree, cave, spring. If there is, this is usually done by resorting to the surrounding circumstances.
We speak, for example, of the cave of Polyphemus, from the man who lived in it, or the cave of Hebron from the region where it is located; the cedar of Lebanon, the rose of Jericho, the palm-tree of Kadesh from the places in which such plants flourish; Jacob's well from the person who opened it up or discovered it or took it over; the fount of healing waters from the health-giving quality of the liquid, and so on. The need to devise proper nouns for all these things is never totally compelling.

149. Proper names, therefore (that is, names used to indicate the individual substance of a thing), are not in fact the most numerous. In all languages, even the richest and most elaborate, an infinite number of objects do not have them. On the other hand, everything has a common name because it is more necessary than a proper name. It would seem that people did not apply proper names until they realised that similar things could be confused without them. I mean similar things which they needed to distinguish and name individually. This could not be achieved without giving each a name indicating its proper, individual nature which alone marks off one particular thing from all others of the same species in such a way that it cannot be confused and associated with them.

150. The point in this argument that needs emphasis is this. Assigning a name to the individual property of an ens by which the ens is singled out and distinguished from all others of the same species requires much greater effort of abstraction than assigning a name which indicates it through one of its common qualities. When we are dealing with bodies, the common qualities of corporeal beings are the first to affect our sensories and become known to us. Consequently, it is much more likely that we would name an ens after these qualities than after its own individual substance which, when stripped of its accidental qualities, does not fall under our senses but is isolated by us from all its other qualities through a process or rather a series of processes of abstraction. For this reason, I hold it to be true that, in the development of the human spirit, a very long time elapses before we realise clearly and specifically - after considerable experience in comparing things - that beyond the common qualities which fall under senses there is something so proper in an ens, something so unique, that it can never be confused with other individuals. Indeed, it actually separates it off from everything else. This something is its very self.

Consequently, our imagined savage will not, in my view, be led to give a proper name to his tree, his cave, his spring at the outset, but only much later when, having seen many caves, trees and springs, he has first managed to distinguish the individuality of each and, more importantly, feels an urgent need to indicate their reality and individuality. This happens perhaps when he is talking to his wife or his children and wants to indicate precisely that cave, that tree, that spring, so that they cannot confuse it with other trees, caves and springs. I do not think that he would ever feel this need in his savage state nor for a long time after, until he had begun to be civilised and taken a number of steps towards civilisation. When the need to indicate the objects individually occurred to him, there can be no doubt that he would achieve it by another, easier method than by the extremely difficult task of devising proper names. He would, instead, use the context, or additional accidental details which I mentioned before, or some other means.

151. We cannot know, therefore, if a name is common merely by examining whether a number of individuals are called by that name. A number of individuals may be called by the same proper name. Similarly, we cannot be certain that a name is proper merely by knowing that it indicates a single individual. Even a single individual can be assigned a common name. If, for example, there were only one survivor from the human race, he would have no need of a proper name; the common name man would be adequate as he could not be confused with others. Nevertheless, that noun would still be common because it would not refer to an individual by means of his own individuality but through his humanity. This quality he alone possesses, since there are no other human beings alive, but it could be possessed in the same way by many other individuals, who would be entitled to the same name. This makes the noun common by nature.

This is more than a mere imaginary conjecture on a par with Smith's account. It is a fact described in sacred Scripture which speaks to us of a time when there was only one man on the earth. Scripture tells us that this man was not given a proper name (which he did not need) but the common name man (in Hebrew, 'Adam' means man). To see more clearly how such a name was truly common, we must look at its origin. It came from the word earth of which, sacred Scripture tells us, man was composed, and it was intended to mean 'an ens made of earth'. The first person in the world to receive a name was not called after his individuality, but after a quality common to those who were to come after him. In other words, Adam was a common name.

152. Instead of resorting to the notion of an imaginary savage, or losing their way in following hypotheses, which all agree is an anti-philosophical approach, our shrewd philosophers could have been expected to consult the great monuments of antiquity which provide real facts.
By investigating these facts, they would have begun to doubt their opinion which, at first sight, appears so certain, that is, 'proper names were formed before common names'.
It is precisely in such seemingly obvious, but deceptive statements as these that the most pernicious, unassailable errors are concealed. Their false evidence leads otherwise cautious people, Mr. Stewart included, to embrace such statements without any evidence, and to imagine themselves dispensed from the painstaking, tedious study of the facts.

If, as I said, these worthy philosophers had examined the origin of the names actually imposed on things by the first human beings, they would undoubtedly have recognised that those ancient names were never arbitrary, as is the case with proper names. They would have realised that these names did not indicate the individual nature of the thing but always a common property. Cain, for example, meant possession, something acquired, possessed. Eve gave him the name, saying: 'I have obtained a new thing with the help of the Lord.' This name is obviously common because it applies to everything recently acquired or recently obtained. Abel means vanity, Eve, lifegiving; Seth, substitute ens; Enoch, dedicated; Lamech, poor, humiliated: all of them are common names. The same may be said of the other Hebrew names for persons and things, all of which are formed in such a way that the individual is signified by a common quality. Consequently they are true, common nouns [App., no. 4]. The same can be said of Greek names and those of the whole of antiquity. There is no doubt that during this period, no one ever knew how to form truly proper names, that is, nouns indicating the very individuality of a thing. This is not the case with modern languages where we find Peter, Paul, etc., Italy, France, England, etc., Adige, Tiber, Po etc., which became truly proper nouns when their etymology was forgotten or people no longer paid any attention to it in conversation.

Moreover, these proper nouns, handed down to us in modern languages from antiquity, are proof of what I am saying. The remaining fragments of their etymologies show that in antiquity they all had their own meaning and were not in any way arbitrary sounds.(111) This is equivalent to saying that antiquity had given to these individual persons, countries, rivers, names which marked them off not by means of their own proper features, but by the features common to a number of other beings of the same species.

153. Antiquity shows us, therefore, that common nouns were discovered much earlier than proper nouns, and that ancient languages normally used common nouns even when they needed to name particular individuals. Truly proper nouns are found only in modern languages.
Behind this fact, as we examine it more carefully, we find that such a process in the formation of languages, though strange at first sight is, in fact, natural to the human spirit and the only one it can adopt. A greater power of abstraction is required of us to perceive and name the individuality of entia than to focus on their common features and assign names to them. It is, moreover, natural and necessary that man's first need is to call entia by their most general features. The need to call them by more special qualities arises only later when confusion caused by lack of specification causes harm and trouble. As human experience and expertise developed, human beings felt the need to distinguish things into smaller classes and give them progressively less common names. Finally, at the ultimate stage of more advanced society, we experience the need to indicate individuals themselves by proper names. These names, the last to be formed, endow speech with its ultimate, perfect completion.
This also explains why everything has a common but not a generic name. An even smaller number have a specific name and, finally, less than one in a thousand - and only in modern languages - are called by a proper name.

It is clear that the worthy philosophers of whom I am speaking, by rejecting the facts to pursue their hypothetical speculation, began their description of the progress of the human mind in the formation of languages and thought at the exact point where they should have ended. They assumed that the first step of the human spirit was the last, and that the first operation was the attribution of proper names, although this occurs only at the final stage because it implies the most highly developed social culture. This is so true that even in modern European languages, which are so advanced and the fruit of thousands of happy years under the influence of Christianity, we can still see in proper names their origin and earlier state as common names.

154. When Smith stated with such assurance that the particular cave, tree, spring which his savage came to know for the first time were without doubt the first objects designated by proper nouns which then became common nouns associated with other individual objects, he was describing exactly the opposite of what occurred. He said that all nouns which are common, were originally proper, and all proper nouns were originally common ones.
This error was due to an inexact concept of proper and common nouns. He believed - and at first sight it does seem true - that a proper noun is one by which a single individual is named and a common noun one by which several individuals are named. In this concept, however, he took what accidentally happens to proper and common nouns for what properly constitutes their nature. A common noun is sometimes applied to a number of individuals and a proper noun to one alone. This, however, occurs accidentally and, as we have seen, the opposite may be the case. Sometimes a common noun is applied to a single individual without ceasing to be common and, conversely, a proper noun is applied to a number of individuals without ceasing to be proper. In fact both proper and common nouns are never applied to more than one individual at a time. The only difference between them is that the individual, when called by a common name, is called and designated by possession of a certain quality in which a number of other individuals share or can share; when called by a proper name, the individual is designated by its own individuality, that is, by aspects that are proper or incommunicable to any other.

It is better, therefore, to say that common nouns have been taken and made to serve as proper nouns rather than say that proper nouns have gone on to be common nouns. Common nouns come to express the individuality of entia which previously was not expressed but implied.
To better clarify how this may have occurred, we need to reflect that a common noun indicating an individual by means of a quality possessed in common with other individuals does not define the individual so completely that it is set apart from all others which share the same quality. Such a noun is not therefore by nature proper, that is, applicable to a determinate individual. It becomes a proper noun only as a result of a tacit convention [App., no. 5], or to put it better, by a convention expressed by the fact of assigning that name, which by nature is common, to designate a particular ens. A common name is thus capable of nominating an individual although this aptitude for indicating and naming an individual is not expressed within the name itself, but lies implicit and latent in the spirit of those who use that particular name to refer to the individual. This fact - that individuality is not expressed directly but only implied in the use of common names applied to individuals - comes about precisely because of the difficulty the human mind has in abstracting individuality, one of the last and the most awkward tasks of all.

155. By way of summary, then, we should remember that the first step which the human spirit takes towards a knowledge of individuality consists in perceiving it associated and enveloped with all its other common qualities, and focusing on it less distinctly than on these qualities.
The spirit initially indicates the common qualities by nouns; it then makes use of them to indicate individuality whose idea, however, has not yet been distinctly perceived and cannot yet be expressed on its own by a proper noun. As I said, this is so difficult that only modern languages offer a few examples of it. So, let us return to our savage. If we wish to claim him as the discoverer of the name of his cave, his tree or spring, we have to say that he most likely observed the following procedure in his operations.

He observes straightaway in his cave, tree or spring some more striking features that have a stronger, more immediate impact on his senses: he sees the cave as hollow, the tree as gnarled and stout, or emerging from the ground to form a tall canopy over his head; the spring as deep or gushing or something similar. Then, by means of these features, he forms truly common names which in his spirit stand for the propositions: 'that which is hollow, stout, high, deep or conspicuous.'
He then appropriates these common nouns to refer to his particular cave, tree and spring. The common noun is to be applied, like the proper noun, to individual objects and does not differ, as I said, from the proper noun except in its capacity for being applied to all objects possessing the qualities the savage notes and mentions. This communality, if I may put it this way, is restricted and removed by the user's attention and by the circumstances in which he uses it.

Let me grant, therefore, with Smith, since he presents us with these assumptions, that originally the savage knew only one cave, one tree, one spring. Given this, he can only apply the nouns he invented to this cave, this tree, this spring, which are all he knows. However, when he comes to discover other caves, other trees and other springs, I maintain that he immediately grasps that these hollow, stout, conspicuous things are not alone in the world; there are a great many hollow, stout and gushing things. It follows that the names he has made up to express whatever corresponds to these qualities already indicate on their own and express each one of the caves, trees and springs, as well as the first.
Our savage would therefore apply - and this would represent a second stage - his common names to a number of caves, trees and springs. Thus the noun which was common from the start, but used initially for only one individual, would not undergo any further modification. It would simply be used to name several individuals, each taken singly.

However, our savage, if he recognised the need to distinguish his cave from all the others, would be taking a third step but without yet forming proper nouns. He would probably distinguish the various caves in his forest by adding such possessive pronouns as mine, yours, his: my cave, your cave, his cave, and so on.(112) But whatever the formation of this phrase, it would always be such as to indicate the cave belonging to him, or to his interlocutor or to a third person.
He still had a very long way to go, therefore, before arriving at the formation of proper nouns. He would have to cease being a savage and to join with others in society. This domestic society, created in his forests but initially restricted and domestic, would then have to broaden out, make great strides in cultural and civil fields, and finally reach the stage of perfection. This would be a level of high civilisation where people become capable of the most subtle and sustained abstractions and of focusing on them, a level at which the need for artefacts increases enormously, at which moral needs develop, extend, become more sophisticated. These needs continually drive people to distinguish things [App., no. 6], to divide major categories into minor ones, to designate more limited species closer to individual status, to arrange them in every necessary and arbitrary way, and finally - as the last and most refined operation - to allocate to individuals themselves names which are used exclusively to indicate their individuality.

156. So far, I have merely studied the development of language which we assume to have been formed by human beings. I have examined only the external product of the inner workings of the spirit without penetrating into the spirit; I have not seen how and with which faculties it is possible to obtain this external product of language. If I were to describe and demonstrate the presence within us of the faculties required for such an operation, developments in the formation of language would be explained. We would have a sufficient reason for these developments and the causes likely to produce them.

Most people are content when they are given an external description of the development of the spirit, because they dwell on what is actually said. Even Stewart, in his attempt to explain how people formed genera and species, is happy with Smith's passage and says that the explanation seems to him as simple as it is satisfactory.

Now, I am also willing to accept for the moment that what Smith tells us in the passage is perfectly true: that people actually did make the transition from proper nouns to common, appellative nouns. Even so, I have to confess that I do not see how Smith's paragraph explains the formation by the human spirit of the classes of individuals which he then calls genera and species. Telling me that people move from proper to common nouns still does not explain what takes place in the spirit during this process. It does not constitute a study of the internal operation of spirit which corresponds to the transition from one type of noun to the other. Nor is it an investigation of the faculties which must be posited for such an operation, or an attempt to solve the problems which, as Stewart himself says, some philosophers have considered one of the most intractable metaphysical quandaries: the formation of genera and species.

157. First of all, it should be noted how Smith somehow shrouds and conceals from himself and his readers the difficulties which arise in seeking to explain the formation of genera and species or, more generally, of abstract ideas.
He does so by feeding the reader with inexact concepts which lead the spirit astray and prevent it from getting to the heart of the problem.
First, he has led us to assume that common nouns refer solely to a group of individuals. As we have seen, these nouns do not apply to a group but to each individual member of a given group or species.
Then, his use of the word group instead of species harbours another error. A group of individuals is always a determinate number or, at least, a finite number of individuals. On the other hand, the noun species does not refer to a determinate number but to all possible individual members endowed with the characteristic or quality deemed to determine the species.

This distinction is extremely germane to our problem for the following reason.
If I am explaining how a person, having assigned a name to an individual, allots the same name to five others and if I assume that with the name he intends to refer to only one single individual at a time, without reference to any similarity they all share, I need assume in that person only the following faculties: 1. of perceiving individuals; 2. of assigning to each of them an arbitrary sign. The person had five individuals and five signs. As the signs were independent of each other in the same way as the individuals were, he was able to use the same word five times in reference to each of the five individuals. If, however, it is a question of explaining the transition from a proper to a common one or, generally speaking, how we come to create common nouns, the problem comes down to this: 'How were people able to name objects by means of a common quality?' To answer this question we have to assume the following faculties in man: the faculty 1. to conceive individuals; 2. to focus his attention on their common qualities, that is, to form abstract ideas; 3. to consider individuals in so far as they are endowed with these common qualities; 4. to express in sounds all these three known things, that is, individuals as such, the common qualities of the individuals, and the individuals in so far as they are endowed with common qualities. This final mode of naming individuals corresponds to the invention of common nouns.

When we form a common noun, therefore, we are not actually assigning a proper name to a determinate number of individuals but designating all the individuals which have a common quality.
We are not inquiring how many individuals possess this common quality; we assign the name universally to all individuals having this quality, whether they be few or many, or to put it more accurately, to all individuals that can possibly possess it - an infinite number. On the other hand, when we assign the same proper noun to several individuals, we need to know in a particular way all the individuals to which we assign the name one after another. In this second case, none of the individual objects - which are not actually present to the person assigning the name - can be said to be designated by the name itself. The common noun however comprises all those objects which are not only not individually present to the person inventing the name, but are merely possible.

Let us assume that a father gives the name 'Peter' to nine children in turn. It does not follow that the tenth son should be called Peter. To name the child, the father has to take another decision, and can either repeat the name or use another. This situation arises whenever he has a new child. He can assign the name 'Paul', 'Anthony' or 'Andrew', or any other name he pleases. On the other hand, when someone invents a common noun, for example, the noun man, he does not name one man or only those men whom he knows and specifically intends to name, but all those who possess or may possess humanity, that is, those common qualities which together make up the human being. He achieves this, not by a number of decisions but by one alone, by the mere imposition of a name. Such an imposition is a general decision which tacitly states: 'I call man all those people who have or will have these qualities.'
To make such a decision, a universal, abstract idea is necessary, that is, not determined to a particular number, such as the idea used in assigning proper names.

Finally, if it is claimed that a proper noun becomes common merely by being applied to a number of individuals in turn, I make the following distinction: either the noun is used to refer to a number of individuals and thus becomes a proper noun standing for each of them (if such is the case, a common noun is not thereby formed, and consequently the formation of common nouns has not yet been explained); or the proper noun, when applied to a number of individuals, has changed its meaning. Instead of referring to the individual itself, as it did from the start, it has moved to indicate the species, that is, individuals by means of a common quality. In this case, we still have to explain how this transition has occurred. How has the human spirit altered the meaning it originally bestowed on the word, and replaced the individual with the idea of a quality common to many individuals? Moreover, how does the spirit discover the common quality? What is the nature of this quality which is first observed by the mind, then detached from the rest and given a name? In other words, all the problems of ancient ideology reappear, though somewhat veiled thanks to Smith's and Stewart's stylish narrative. These problems are not picked up by the younger reading public although their solution and the consequent explanation of ideas is not thereby rendered less urgent, or less difficult.

This approach, by assuming that the only faculty in man consists in our perception of individuals, renders impossible any explanation of common nouns, and of ideas of genus and species, although this is what Smith and Stewart attempt to do. In their zeal, they would have us believe that a proper noun, when applied in turn to a certain number of individuals, is automatically changed to a common one. According to them, a proper noun represents simply a group of individuals although they do not say how many are sufficient to form the group. In fact, a common noun is applicable to all possible individuals in a given species. These individuals are infinite in number.

158. In order to understand better the unreliability of the assumption made by Smith when he accepts that a proper noun becomes common as soon as it is applied to a number of individuals,(113) we should also note the absurdity to which it leads. If a proper noun becomes common by its attribution to a number of individuals, it becomes more common each time it is attributed to an additional individual. In other words, it will then refer to a more extensive species of thing - something which, as we can see straightaway, is utterly untrue. Thus, the name Peter, if given to two sons, has in Smith's view already become a common noun; if it is given to three or four, it will be even more common, and if to five, six, seven and so on, more common still.

Obviously, we can use the meaning of common noun improperly, if we want. A proper noun can certainly be called common in one sense when it is referred to a group of individuals taken as individuals, that is, to the three, four or more people called Peter. But it is not common either in the grammarian's meaning of the term or in the philosopher's because it does not refer to a species or genus of things. We are trying, however, to explain how the ideas of species and genus are formed. The noun certainly becomes more common in the first sense, as it is successively applied to more individuals. But a common noun, taken in the sense of our argument is common right from the beginning; it does not become more common when applied to a larger number of individuals. Of its nature it refers intrinsically to all possible individuals of a species, neither more nor less. Take the noun man, and apply it in turn to one, two, three, ten, a hundred, a thousand human beings. Is it now more common than it was? Previously, it already indicated not a restricted group, but all possible human beings taken individually, that is, all those entia referred to by the word mankind -wherever and whenever they may be, even when conceived solely in the mind.

159. I appeal from the philosophers' theories to the common sense of any ordinary person; the former, when they hold firmly to some opinion, deny that they see what everyone else sees. They fear that a frank avowal of this nature would lead to the rebuttal of their statements. But even the most ordinary person, using his common sense, is able to express his opinion on a subject, such as the meaning of words, which falls within his right and competence. Such meaning is not the exclusive property of philosophers and, fortunately, cannot readily be altered by their quibbles. Take the word man or any other common noun. Does it refer to a determined number of individuals? Or has it some value that can be applied to an unspecified and undefined number of individuals, that is, to all entia possessing human nature or thought to be able to possess it?

But, if the common noun, in its usually accepted sense, involves the notion of the possibility of other individuals, we still have to explain the nature of this indeterminate possibility attached to common nouns. How does such an idea, which extends the meaning of the word as far as the concept of possibility, originate in us?
It is an undeniable fact that everyone who speaks, adds to the meaning of common nouns the idea of the possibility of other individuals of the species represented by the noun. This idea of possibility is universal; indeed it is the most universal idea of all. It bears no relationship with individuals, although it enables us to think of an ever greater number of them.

Let us imagine the case of entia who lack the power to think this possibility and who, as a result, are able to perceive only a given number of individuals. In this singular species of entia, we can imagine a wide variation in perceptive powers because we could assume that some would be capable of perceiving five individuals, others ten but no more, others a hundred, a thousand, a thousand million and so on. All of them, nevertheless, would be determined to perceive a determinate number of existing individuals, but none would be able to extend itself to the possibility of other individuals above that number. Now compare human intelligence with such a species of entia. We do not perceive merely a determinate number of existing individuals, five, ten, a thousand, and so on. Using our innate intelligence, we can always add the concept of all possible individuals, something indefinitely greater, to the number of individuals perceived by us. Now, the species of our imaginary entia could never form anything but proper nouns. Only human beings can form common nouns because we can think universally of purely possible individuals. If our imagined entia also wished to designate with a separate name each of the specified number of individuals which they perceive (although this is in fact impossible, we can still assume it), they would not assign the same proper name to many individuals. No common noun would have been formed. Humans, on the other hand, are able to formulate a common noun because they can give a name to entia insofar as they recognise them as endowed with a common quality. We can assign such a name because 1. we have the faculty, as I have said above, of focusing upon a quality possessed by one individual which can be shared by other individuals; and 2. we have the faculty of knowing this possibility; that is, the possibility that this quality is shared by other individuals, regardless of number, place and time.

160. The following ideas are added, therefore, to the common noun: 1. the idea of some quality; 2. the idea of the quality's aptitude for being shared by an individual; 3. the idea of the possibility that this quality may be shared by an indefinite number of individuals. All these ideas are comprised in the idea of species and genus which is presupposed by the common noun. In fact, the common noun expresses the species or genus which is obtained by means of a quality known to be potentially common to an infinite number of individuals.
What more can we say? Smith's argument offers no explanation about the way in which we form the ideas of genus and species. To put it briefly and clearly, his argument is summed up as follows: 'We turn proper nouns into common nouns by assigning them successively to a number of individuals. These nouns, when applied to a number of individuals, are those which form species and genera in our mind.'

My reply can be summed up as follows: 'The mere assignment of a proper noun to several individuals does not make it common. To become common, that noun must change its value; in other words it must no longer indicate individuals through that which forms their individuality, but begin to indicate them by some common quality. For this to happen, an internal operation of the spirit is needed, as only the spirit can change the meaning of a word. But the spirit cannot alter the meaning of a word except 1. by using it to indicate a common quality in place of the previously indicated individuality; and 2. by adding to this quality the concept that the possibility may be shared indefinitely by individuals.

'The common noun, therefore, does not replace such ideas in our mind; these ideas give the noun its value. In other words, these ideas are the means whereby the spirit transforms proper nouns into common nouns.
'Consequently, although it has been stated - falsely, it must be said - that we acquire proper nouns first, which later become common, we still have no explanation of how we form genera and species. The spirit cannot in fact devise common nouns unless it has formed, previously or simultaneously, the genera and species of things.'

161. If my argument so far is true, the difficulty which I mentioned at the start in Smith's and Stewart's theory has not been solved.
At present, as we inquire how the spirit conceives the ideas of species and genera, the argument runs as follows: 'We are unable to form a genus or species without the idea of some common quality which, in turn, cannot be formed without a judgment. But a judgment presupposes the idea of a common quality, that is, the idea of one of those classes called genera or species. How is it possible, then, for us to form an a priori judgment if all the ideas of common qualities - which is another way of saying universal ideas - are acquired, and there is nothing innate in our spirit?'

162. Smith and Stewart, like all nominalists, resort to denying the existence of universal ideas which, they maintain, are merely words. They are incapable of disentangling this complex issue because they cannot define what else these mysterious ideas may be, and how the spirit forms or discovers them. The difficulty is present in any attempt to explain their formation. Many contemporary philosophers cannot see how to extricate themselves from such a philosophical quicksand and, as a result, have tried to convince themselves that the difficulty is merely an illusion. In Stewart's view, for instance, 'what the ancients' - poor unfortunates - 'had considered one of the most difficult problems in metaphysics, had a simple solution such as Smith's.'
However, this way of underestimating the problem does not constitute a successful solution; words cannot replace things, nor common nouns supply for universal ideas. On the contrary, the human spirit cannot form a common noun unless it possesses the universal idea corresponding to the noun in question.
Nothing would seem more obvious. But is there anything so obvious that is not openly denied by philosophers who find it distasteful?
Today, nominalists are on the increase because people imagine they have found a very easy solution to such a serious difficulty. The following argument, showing more clearly the fallacy of the reasons advanced by Stewart to confirm his view - all of which assume what has to be proved - will not therefore be wasted.

163. Words without any meaning whatsoever are merely useless sounds and cannot be used to help forward an argument; this statement seems as clear as daylight.
But words with a universal meaning, such as common nouns, do not refer to determinate individuals, and are therefore either meaningless or indicate universal ideas.
This reason alone might have led Mr. Stewart to see how impossible it is to assume the non-existence of universal ideas whose place is taken by mere words. In other words, what is usually termed a universal idea is merely a word. This argument is so simple and so conclusive that it is difficult to understand how the Scottish professor did not think of it.

164. He may have reached his conclusion, however, by his success, without ever mentioning the terms genera, species, general ideas, in describing how we make use of universal words. Having eliminated these words from the discussion, he was led to believe that he had succeeded in making their corresponding ideas superfluous and useless.

This is how he explains the use of universal terms:

He seems to mean that we do not need to have connected universal ideas to words. It is enough to have acquired the habit of mentally replacing them with given individuals. All we need to explain the formation of universal arguments is 1. to know how to conceive individuals; and 2. to have words for which we normally substitute certain individuals at our choice. According to him, this is the way words represent so-called universal ideas.

165. His argument, however, contains a petitio principii as the following shows. First, how can such a habit be acquired? How do we acquire the habit of replacing a given universal term not merely by some random individual but by certain, designated and determinate individuals? For example, the term man is never given the meaning 'animals' or 'rocks' but always and only, 'individuals of the human species'. Why is the habit of using the word man restricted to that class of things and not to others? Is there some power, intrinsic to the material word which forces us to apply it only to certain, specific individuals? Not at all. There is no necessary connection between the physical word and the individuals which it signifies. A word is pure sound; it frequently draws our attention to things which are not sounds and have nothing to do with sounds. The only possible relationship between the sound which forms the word man and the ens to which it refers is that made by our spirit between the word and the thing.

166. This is an arbitrary connection, you will say. Here we agree on one point: if any society wished to use the noun man to refer to animals as a genus and agreed as a body to give it this meaning, the members of the society would understand by the word man what we now call animal, just as we understand one another when we use the word in a more restricted sense.
It is the will which decides and determines that certain individuals, and not others, can be replaced by a given common noun. This is the crux of the matter: how can the will determine that these, rather than those, particular individuals replace a given term in such a way that others cannot? Is a fixed number of individuals determined and assigned to the term? This would be possible if it were agreed that three men, Peter, Paul and Andrew should be called by a certain noun which could be replaced only by one of these three individuals. In this case, however, either this noun would not be universal but a merely proper noun given arbitrarily to each of the three or, if it were a common noun - for example, if it were agreed that friend should be reserved only for any one of these three - this noun would be usurped by agreement in place of the proper noun. In this case, two things rather than one would have to be explained: 1. how did it come to be a common noun, and 2. how could it be used instead of a proper noun? In short, the issue is to show how the human spirit links a certain individual to a common noun. Whatever assumption one makes, this difficulty can never be avoided. As I said, it is not a question of replacing certain enumerated, determined individuals by common nouns.

If this were the whole matter under discussion, we would need only some association of ideas or a mere power of recall which, upon hearing the sound, would awaken in us one of the two, three, five, ten determined individuals to whom we had designated the noun. But the exact opposite is present in common nouns. It is not a question of our mentally replacing a common noun by a known individual which we specially discern and target, that is, an individual previously selected from a determined number of known things. On the contrary, the issue is to replace an individual taken from an indefinite number of individuals that are unknown to us from experience. These individuals may not even exist; they may only be possible.

Think for a moment. We do not have to substitute the universal term horse by one of the horses we have seen or even by an existing horse. We can, if we wish, substitute a non-existent horse. The word alone does not refer to an existing horse. But even if we were obliged to substitute an existent horse for the word horse, it would not matter which existent horse we substituted. It could be one seen years earlier or one seen for the first time. But if this does not matter, why does it not matter? We certainly have not seen, one by one, every horse that exists and decided in every case to call each one a horse. Assigning names to so many beasts would have been impossible. Nor would other persons have had the time or patience to make such a pact with us. They would need not only the word horse but countless other nouns required by human conversation which refer to different species of things. It would be far too tedious and tiring to have to name individuals one by one to obtain a common noun so that, on hearing it we could mentally substitute one of the individuals already designated singularly. Moreover, it would be a disaster not to be able to name newly born or formed individuals with names already given to their predecessors. We could do nothing more than name individual things which would be extremely difficult and tedious to enumerate.

167. This is tantamount to saying that common nouns are not formed in this way. The human spirit does not attach to them a given number of individuals examined one by one. It attaches a species of individuals to them, that is, all the possible individuals having a common quality. Thus individuals are substituted for the common noun, if it is used. These individuals, however, are 1. not selected at random (there would be no distinction between species and genera); and 2. not selected as a result of conventions governing particular individuals (this would mean going on ad infinitum). On the contrary, certain individuals are substituted for a common noun: 1. on the basis of a universal rule which ascertains whether individuals possess the common quality to which the common noun refers; 2. these are not known or existing individuals but possible individuals, that is, any individual whatsoever that can be thought of as endowed with the common quality.

Consequently, although we may never have seen the individual previously, its mere appearance suddenly reminds us that its name had been determined and set by human beings even before it had come to exist. It has the quality which places it in the class of individuals to which the name has been assigned.

168. Stewart's habit of resorting to the expedient of substitution is thus of no avail. The habit of replacing certain things by such nouns is useless for merely possible things and for things which, although not yet known individually, can be grasped by the human mind.
This explains why Stewart, when he states that there is no need for universal ideas and that we only need to know how to replace given individuals for the common nouns which express them, contradicts himself by asserting what he has already denied. Being able to replace the given individuals for common nouns means possessing universal ideas. The substitution cannot be made without these ideas because without them we would not know which individuals were to replace the common nouns. The mind needs first to distinguish the species and genera of individuals so that it can link to a given term the individuals of a given species, not others - and, of course, individuals of another species to another term. Then it must know how to distinguish these individuals of different species as belonging to one species rather than another, and be able to do this before naming them. It will know what to call them only when it knows the species to which they belong. If a flower is covered by grass, I can't apply the word flower to it, but as soon as I can see it I recognise it as belonging to the species of things called flowers.

(105) The whole of Smith's discourse - whether true or false - is not a factual account: it is a piece of pure imagination whereby he attempts to discover what seems the most likely explanation in the hypothesis of the savage. We should not believe that the philosophies of Smith, Stewart and similar modern philosophers are based solely on observation and facts. Imagination also has its part to play in their work where it occupies a prominent place. We have an example here. The subject is crucial in philosophy, and deals with a problem on which the whole of philosophy hinges. How do Smith and Stewart go about solving this important question? They begin by laying the foundations of their whole argument, and these foundations are based on imagination! So they begin by using their imagination to discover what they think the most likely way for a savage - assuming the theory that he was devoid from the beginning of ideas and words - to form words and ideas. The charming fiction of this savage enables them to draw their conclusions. And they call this 'philosophical method'! It is true that their account contains heartening phrases such as: there can be no doubt and of course this was how it had to happen and similar expressions. And you still do not believe them? Have you no faith in the authority of their imagination?However, I do not think that we are dispensed from examining: 1. whether what might inevitably occur in the natural course of events (according to their imagination) corresponds to fact, to what has actually been seen to occur in similar cases; 2. whether, as a consequence, their 'hypothesis' of a savage completely devoid of words and ideas, on which the whole of their system is ultimately based, is sustainable. This is what I shall attempt to do with the observations that follow on the passage from Smith's work and on Stewart's theories.

(106) [Cf. Foreword, p. zz] Stewart admits that Condillac mentions under the same heading the development of the human spirit in the formation of genera and species. Condillac's achievement in bringing the interdependence of speech and thought to the attention of philosophers is widely acknowledged. When dealing with Condillac's theories, I could therefore have made some of the comments which I am now making on Stewart's system and his explanation of the formation of genera and species. However, I thought it better to reserve it for this article rather than speak for too long about Condillac. Readers can themselves apply to Condillac's theory several of my remarks on the views of Smith and Stewart.

(107) The word ten is common to all species of things of which there are ten. This commonality, however, does not invalidate my remark that it is not a noun common to each individual member of the group referred to. If it is common to all things of which there are ten, then it contains another abstraction and is used in a different mode; it no longer expresses the group but a qualification of the groups themselves.

(108) In saying this, I do not mean to assert that these abstract ideas cannot be analysed and broken down into simpler ideas. In fact, all abstract ideas which express species of things, such as tree, and so on, are merely a complex of simple qualities gathered into one. However, I maintain that we unite them (this is not the place to deal with how we unite them) and consider them as a single, indivisible thing. We need this operation by which we unite a number of qualities in a single concept if subsequently we have to invent common nouns.

(109) In fact, the existence of the noun which refers to the abstract idea is not strictly necessary for the existence of the common noun which refers to the ens possessing the abstract characteristic. There are many nouns in our language without a corresponding abstract. For example, we say tree, cave, spring and so on, but not treeness, caveness, etc.The existence of such nouns, like that of all the rest, depends on whether humans have needed to use them. Only the need of a word ensures its creation. However, while languages do not always register the entire process of ideas (it is not always necessary to use language to express concepts), it does not follow that the process of ideas in the mind is discontinuous and incomplete. If the process of ideas in the mind were interrupted, the mind would work by fits and starts, without any coherent inner argument, which is absurd. Even more absurd is the assumption that composite ideas can exist without thought of their constitutive elements. It is necessary therefore to accept that, where a common name has been invented, for example, tree, the corresponding thought has also occurred in the mind. This, expressed in isolation in the example I gave, would be treeness. The fact that this idea is not expressed by a noun does not mean that such a noun is not essential to form the term tree. This concept, reduced to its elements, merely indicates 'something endowed with those characteristics which, expressed in one word, would be called treeness.' However, this does not prove that these qualities have been thought abstractly, apart from their subjects. They have been thought together with the specific subject to which they belong.

(110) I choose to analyse carefully this passage of Smith, referred to by Stewart, as an outstanding example serving to disabuse so many of our youth and superficial people who imagine that the prerogative of thinking philosophically is exclusively confined to people who live north of the Alps and beyond the seas surrounding our beautiful land.

(111) This explains why the ancients were much more ready to note the priority of common nouns over proper nouns than we are. Aristotle did so in his On Physics (bk. 1, c. 1), where he clearly states that man first formed common nouns and then proper nouns. It is strange, then, to see how Aristotle bases his view on a fact very much like that mentioned by Smith to demonstrate the opposite view. This shows how facts, when not supported by good, correct understanding on the part of their user, do not on their own lead to truth, but are themselves an occasion of misuse and error. According to Smith: 'The savage calls all the caves he sees by the name assigned to his cave. He first formed the proper noun and then made it common.'According to Aristotle: 'The child calls all the men he sees father until he has learned to tell the difference between father and other men. It follows that the name he gives his father is common for the child who does not restrict the meaning of this common noun to indicate his father alone until he notices the differences and his mistake in taking his father for any ordinary man. His understanding therefore proceeds from the general to the particular, from the genus to the differences allowing him to know the species'.

(112) Consider this fact: in ancient languages there are many names which are actually made up of a common noun and a possessive pronoun joined to it. For example, in Hebrew Sarai means my lady. The same can be said of many other words ending with the letter i indicating the possessive pronoun my.

(113) The philosophers in question make no attempt to prove this statement: they assume their readers take it as true. Their argument is as follows: 'A common noun is one applied to a number of individuals. Therefore, to invent a common noun requires only that a proper noun be attributed to a number of individuals; this is a basic fact.' The first assumption in this argument is taken as certain; the remainder is completely correct, if the major premiss is true. With this method of theirs, you can go a long way; in fact, you get wherever you wish. If you wish to prove some strange theory, you begin by carefully forming a proposition which implicitly contains your theory. Then you either declare it to be true, or assume that it is accepted, or if you prefer, imply it in your argument. Next, you analyse it and draw from it precisely the finding which it already contains. You will have proved your point easily since you have skilfully assumed as true what you were required to prove. This is a most useful method.

(114) Eléments de la Philosophie de l'esprit humain, chap. 4, section 2.