Note note 78 — ANALYSIS OF THE PHENOMENA OF THE HUMAN MIND James Mill

78 The doctrine that “men were led to class solely for the purpose of economizing in the use of names,” is here reasserted in the most unqualified terms. The author plainly says that if our memory had been sufficiently vast to contain a name for every individual, the names of classes and the idea of classification would never have existed. Yet how (I am obliged to ask) could we have done without them? We could not have dispensed with names to mark the points in which different individuals resemble one another: and these are class-names. The fact that we require names for the purpose of making affirmations—of predicating qualities—is in some measure recognised by the author, when he says “it would have required a most inconvenient portion of time to run over in discourse as many names of individuals and of individual qualities as there is occasion to refer to in discourse.” But what is meant by an individual quality? It is not individual qualities that we ever have occasion to predicate. It is true that the qualities of an object are only the various ways in which we or other minds are affected by it, and these affections are not the same in different objects, except in the sense in which the word same stands for exact similarity. But we never have occasion to predicate of an object the individual and instantaneous impressions which it produces in us. The only meaning of predicating a quality at all, is to affirm a resemblance. When we ascribe a quality to an object, we intend to assert that the object affects us in a manner similar to that in which we are affected by a known class of objects. A quality, indeed, in the custom of language, does not admit of individuality: it is supposed to be one thing common to many; which, being explained, means that it is the name of a resemblance among our sensations, and not a name of the individual sensations which resemble. Qualities, therefore, cannot be predicated without general names; nor, consequently, without classification. Wherever there is a general name there is a class: classification, and general names, are things exactly coextensive. It thus appears that, without classification, language would not fulfil its most important function. Had we no names but those of individuals, the names might serve as marks to bring those individuals to mind, but would not enable us to make a single assertion respecting them, except that one individual is not another. Not a particle of the knowledge we have of them could be expressed in words.—Ed.