that property be the best mark of those which are known. M. De Blainville, for instance, founded his definition of life on the process of decomposition and recomposition which incessantly takes place in every living body, so that the particles composing it are never for two instants the same. This is by no means one of the most obvious properties of living bodies; it might escape altogether the notice of an unscientific observer. Yet great authorities (independently of M. De Blainville, who is himself a first-rate authority) have thought that no other property so well answers the conditions required for the definition.
§ 5. Having laid down the principles which ought for the most part to be observed in attempting to give a precise connotation to a term in use, I must now add, that it is not always practicable to adhere to those principles, and that even when practicable, it is occasionally not desirable.
Cases in which it is impossible to comply with all the conditions of a precise definition of a name in agreement with usage, occur very frequently. There is often no one connotation capable of being given to a word, so that it shall still denote every thing it is accustomed to denote; or that all the propositions into which it is accustomed to enter, and which have any foundation in truth, shall remain true. Independently of accidental ambiguities, in which the different meanings have no connection with one [pg 473] another; it continually happens that a word is used in two or more senses derived from each other, but yet radically distinct. So long as a term is vague, that is, so long as its connotation is not ascertained and permanently fixed, it is constantly liable to be applied by extension from one thing to another, until it reaches things which have little, or even no, resemblance to those which were first designated by it.
“Suppose,” says Dugald Stewart, in his Philosophical Essays,3 “that the letters A, B, C, D, E, denote a series of objects; that A possesses some one quality in common with B; B a quality in common with C; C a quality in