This paradox, however, may, I suppose, be easily over-stated.  The change that continually agitates Nature consists in the movements of masses or molecules, and such movements of things are compatible with a considerable persistence of their qualities.  Not only are the molecular changes always going on in a piece of gold compatible with its remaining yellow, but its persistent yellowness depends on the continuance of some of those changes.  Similarly, a man’s hair may remain black for some years; though, no doubt, at a certain age its colour may begin to be problematical, and the applicability to it of ‘black’ or ‘not-black’ may become a matter of genuine anxiety.  Whilst being on our guard, then, against fallacies of contradiction arising from the imperfect correspondence of fact with thought and language, we shall often have to put up with it.  Candour and humility having been satisfied by the above acknowledgment of the subtlety of Nature, we may henceforward proceed upon the postulate—­that it is possible to use contradictory terms such as cannot both be predicated of the same subject in the same relation, though one of them may be; that, for example, it may be truly said of a man for some years that his hair is black; and, if so, that during those years to call it not-black is false or extremely misleading.

The most opposed terms of the literary vocabulary, however, such as ‘wise-foolish,’ ‘old-young,’ ‘sweet-bitter,’ are rarely true contradictories:  wise and foolish, indeed, cannot be predicated of the same man in the same relation; but there are many middling men, of whom neither can be predicated on the whole.  For the comparison of quantities, again, we have three correlative terms, ‘greater—­equal—­less,’ and none of these is the contradictory of either of the others.  In fact, the contradictory of any term is one that denotes the sum of its co-ordinates (Sec. 6); and to obtain a contradictory, the surest way is to coin one by prefixing to the given term the particle ‘not’ or (sometimes) ‘non’:  as ‘wise, not-wise,’ ‘human, non-human,’ ‘greater, not-greater.’

The separate word ‘not’ is surer to constitute a contradictory than the usual prefixes of negation, ‘un-’ or ‘in-,’ or even ‘non’; since compounds of these are generally warped by common use from a purely negative meaning.  Thus, ‘Nonconformist’ does not denote everybody who fails to conform.  ‘Unwise’ is not equivalent to ‘not-wise,’ but means ‘rather foolish’; a very foolish action is not-wise, but can only be called unwise by meiosis or irony.  Still, negatives formed by ‘in’ or ‘un’ or ‘non’ are sometimes really contradictory of their positives; as ‘visible, invisible,’ ‘equal, unequal.’