This at least is true formally, though in practice we should think ourselves trifled with if any one told us that ’A mountain is either human or non-human, but not both.’  It is symbolic terms, such as X and x, that are properly said to be contradictories in relation to any subject whatever, S or M. For, as we have seen, the ordinary use of terms is limited by some suppositio, and this is true of Contradictories.  ‘Human’ and ‘non-human’ may refer to zoological classification, or to the scope of physical, mental, or moral powers—­as if we ask whether to flourish a dumbbell of a ton weight, or to know the future by intuition, or impeccability, be human or non-human.  Similarly, ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ refer either to the power of emitting or reflecting light, so that the words have no hold upon a sound or a scent, or else to power of vision and such qualifications as ’with the naked eye’ or ‘with a microscope.’

Again, the above definition of Contradictories tells us that they cannot be predicated of the same Subject “in the same relation”; that is, at the same time or place, or under the same conditions.  The lamp is visible to me now, but will be invisible if I turn it out; one side of it is now visible, but the other is not:  therefore without this restriction, “in the same relation,” few or no terms would be contradictory.

If a man is called wise, it may mean ‘on the whole’ or ’in a certain action’; and clearly a man may for once be wise (or act wisely) who, on the whole, is not-wise.  So that here again, by this ambiguity, terms that seem contradictory are predicable of the same subject, but not “in the same relation.”  In order to avoid the ambiguity, however, we have only to construct the term so as to express the relation, as ’wise on the whole’; and this immediately generates the contradictory ’not-wise on the whole.’  Similarly, at one age a man may have black hair, at another not-black hair; but the difficulty is practically removable by stating the age referred to.

Still, this case easily leads us to a real difficulty in the use of contradictory terms, a difficulty arising from the continuous change or ‘flux’ of natural phenomena.  If things are continually changing, it may be urged that contradictory terms are always applicable to the same subject, at least as fast as we can utter them:  for if we have just said that a man’s hair is black, since (like everything else) his hair is changing, it must now be not-black, though (to be sure) it may still seem black.  The difficulty, such as it is, lies in this, that the human mind and its instrument language are not equal to the subtlety of Nature.  All things flow, but the terms of human discourse assume a certain fixity of things; everything at every moment changes, but for the most part we can neither perceive this change nor express it in ordinary language.