Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: deafness. These terms, it is said, have no meaning if applied to beings which do not normally possess the powers of sight and hearing. On the other hand, the terms not-seeing, not-hearing, are negative; they are applicable to inanimate beings as well as to beings which can possess such powers. The difference between negative and privative is, however, one of degree only; a privative name is a negative name which has the additional implication that the subject ought normally to possess the specified mark or property. 5. Absolute and Relative Concepts. ? In formal logic a name is called Absolute when its meaning is complete without involving a relation to another name. A name is Relative if its complete connotation does involve a relation to some other name. For example, the names husband, parent, brother, king, are relative names; while the names, metal, dog, man, happiness, are absolute names; the meaning of husband, parent, brother, king, is not complete without the relation to wife, other brothers or sisters, subjects; while the meaning of metal, dog, man, happiness, involves no such necessary relation. The meaning of a relative name must not be confounded with the meaning which a name may have for any mind in consequence of all it suggests to that mind; in the logical sense of the term a name is not relative because it suggests various other names, every name does that; but because that which is suggested is a part of its meaning. The name home suggests to my mind a thousand things, no one of which is anypart of the logical connotation of this name; likewise the name father calls to my mind a hundred things which are not part of the logical meaning of this name; but this name does suggest one thing which is a necessary part of its connotation, viz. offspring, son or daugh…
