language, therefore, embodies an irregular classification of things with their attributes and relations according to our knowledge and beliefs.  The best attempt (known to me) to carry out this view is contained in Roget’s Thesaurus, which is a classification of English words according to their meanings:  founded, as the author tells us, on the models of Zoology and Botany, it has some of the requisites of a Logical Dictionary.

Popular language, indeed, having grown up with a predominantly practical purpose, represents a very imperfect classification philosophically considered.  Things, or aspects, or processes of things, that have excited little interest, have often gone unnamed:  so that scientific discoverers are obliged, for scientific purposes, to invent thousands of new names.  Strong interests, on the other hand, give such a colour to language, that, where they enter, it is difficult to find any indifferent expressions. Consistency being much prized, though often the part of a blockhead, inconsistency implies not merely the absence of the supposed virtue, but a positive vice:  Beauty being attractive and ugliness the reverse, if we invent a word for that which is neither, ‘plainness,’ it at once becomes tinged with the ugly.  We seem to love beauty and morality so much as to be almost incapable of signifying their absence without expressing aversion.

Again, the erroneous theories of mankind have often found their way into popular speech, and their terms have remained there long after the rejection of the beliefs they embodied:  as—­lunatic, augury, divination, spell, exorcism:  though, to be sure, such words may often be turned to good account, besides the interest of preserving their original sense.  Language is a record as well as an index of ideas.

Language, then, being essentially classificatory, any attempt to ascertain the meaning of a word, far from neglecting its relations to others, should be directed toward elucidating them.

Every word belongs to a group, and this group to some other larger group.  A group is sometimes formed by derivation, at least so far as different meanings are marked merely by inflections, as short, shorter, shorten, shortly; but, for the most part, is a conflux of words from many different sources. Repose, depose, suppose, impose, propose, are not nearly connected in meaning; but are severally allied in sense much more closely with words philologically remote.  Thus repose is allied with rest, sleep, tranquillity; disturbance, unrest, tumult; whilst depose is, in one sense, allied with overthrow, dismiss, dethrone; restore, confirm, establish; and, in another sense, with declare, attest, swear, prove, etc.  Groups of words, in fact, depend on their meanings, just as the connection of scientific names follows the resemblance in character of the things denoted.