Note note 13 — ANALYSIS OF THE PHENOMENA OF THE HUMAN MIND James Mill

13 It seems hardly a proper expression to say that Physician and Patient, or that Father and Son, are one name made up of two parts. When one of the parts is a name of one person and the other part is the name of another, it is difficult to see how the two together can be but one name. Father and Son are two names, denoting different persons: but what the author had it in his mind to say, was that they connote the same series of facts, which series, as the two persons are both indispensable parts of it, gives names to them both, and is made the foundation or fundamentum of an attribute ascribed to each.

With the exception of this questionable use of language, which the author had recourse to because he had not left himself the precise word Connote, to express what there is of real identity in the signification of the two names; the analysis which follows of the various complicated cases of relation seems philosophically unexceptionable. The complexity of a relation consists in the complex composition of the series of facts or phenomena which the names connote, and which is the fundamentum relationis. The names signify that the person or thing, of which they are predicated, forms part of a group or succession of phenomena along with the other person or thing which is its correlate: and the special nature of that group or series, which may be of extreme complexity, constitutes the speciality of the relation predicated.—Ed.