[37] That generalization or abstraction which gives to similar things a common name, is certainly no laborious exercise of intellect; nor does any mind find difficulty in applying such a name to an individual by means of the article.  The general sense and the particular are alike easy to the understanding, and I know not whether it is worth while to inquire which is first in order.  Dr. Alexander Murray says, “It must be attentively remembered, that all terms run from a general to a particular sense.  The work of abstraction, the ascent from individual feelings to classes of these, was finished before terms were invented.  Man was silent till he had formed some ideas to communicate; and association of his perceptions soon led him to think and reason in ordinary matters.”—­Hist. of European Languages, Vol.  I, p. 94.  And, in a note upon this passage, he adds:  “This is to be understood of primitive or radical terms.  By the assertion that man was silent till he had formed ideas to communicate, is not meant, that any of our species were originally destitute of the natural expressions of feeling or thought.  All that it implies, is, that man had been subjected, during an uncertain period of time, to the impressions made on his senses by the material world, before he began to express the natural varieties of these by articulated sounds. * * * * * * Though the abstraction which formed such classes, might be greatly aided or supported by the signs; yet it were absurd to suppose that the sign was invented, till the sense demanded it.”—­Ib., p. 399.

[38] Dr. Alexander Murray too, In accounting for the frequent abbreviation of words, seems to suggest the possibility of giving them the celerity of thought:  “Contraction is a change which results from a propensity to make the signs as rapid as the thoughts which they express.  Harsh combinations soon suffer contraction.  Very long words preserve only the principal, that is, the accented part.  If a nation accents its words on the last syllable, the preceding ones will often be short, and liable to contraction.  If it follow a contrary practice, the terminations are apt to decay.”—­History of European Languages, Vol.  I, p. 172.

[39] “We cannot form a distinct idea of any moral or intellectual quality, unless we find some trace of it in ourselves.”—­Beattie’s Moral Science, Part Second, Natural Theology, Chap.  II, No. 424.

[40] “Aristotle tells us that the world is a copy or transcript of those ideas which are in the mind of the first Being, and that those ideas which are in the mind of man, are a transcript of the world.  To this we may add, that words are the transcripts of those ideas which are in the mind of man, and that writing or printing are [is] the transcript of words.”—­Addison, Spect., No. 166.

[41] Bolingbroke on Retirement and Study, Letters on History, p. 364.

[42] See this passage in “The Economy of Human Life,” p. 105—­a work feigned to be a compend of Chinese maxims, but now generally understood to have been written or compiled by Robert Dodsley, an eminent and ingenious bookseller in London.