When the author says that abstract relative names differ from other abstract names in not being wholly void of connotation, inasmuch as they connote their correlatives, priority connoting posteriority, and posteriority priority, he deserts the specific meaning which he has sought to attach to the word connote, and falls back upon the loose and general sense in which everything implied by a term is said to be connoted by it. But in this large sense of the word (as I have more than once remarked) it is not true that non-relative abstract names have no connotation. Every abstract name—every name of the character which is given by the terminations ness, tion, and the like—carries with it a uniform implication that what it is predicated of is an attribute of something else; not a sensation or a thought in and by itself, but a sensation or thought regarded as one of, or as accompanying or following, some permanent cluster of sensations or thoughts.—Ed.
84 Among the abstract terms corresponding to relative concretes, those corresponding to cause and effect, are the only ones which, on account of their importance, require to be somewhat more particularly expounded.
Cause and Effect have not abstract terms formed immediately from themselves. One of the grand causes of their obscurity is, that they are not constant in their meaning, but are sometimes used as concretes, sometimes as their own abstracts.
Cause means “something causing;” effect, “something caused.” Causingness, therefore, is the proper abstract of cause; and causedness, the proper abstract of effect. Of two objects, A, and B, we call the one causing, the other caused, when they are not only prior and posterior, but parts of the same series; and, if we speak strictly, proximate parts. Of proximate parts of the same series, we call the antecedent, causing; the consequent, caused. Causingness, and causedness, therefore, mean antecedence and consequence, and something more. The ideas are more complex. Causingness and causedness, mean, not only antecedence and consequence, but also sameness of series, and proximity of parts.
As we have seen, that priority and posteriority, taken together, form a compound name of a certain complex idea, so causingness and causedness, taken together, form the compound name of a still more complex idea. Having frequent occasion to express that idea, a separate name for it was found necessary. Accordingly, we have the term Power, which means precisely what is meant by causingness and causedness taken together. Causation has the same 85 meaning with Power, except that it connotes present time; Power connotes indefinite time.[20]
[20] The term Causation, as the author observes, signifies causingness and causedness taken together, but I do not see on what ground he asserts that it connotes present time. To my thinking, it is as completely aoristic as Power. Power, again, seems to me to express, not causingness and causedness taken together, but causingness only. Some of the older philosophers certainly talked of passive power, but neither in the precise language of modern philosophy nor in common speech is an effect said to have the power of being produced, but only the capacity or capability. The power is always conceived as belonging to the cause only. When any co-operating power is supposed to reside in the thing said to be acted upon, it is because some active property in that thing is counted as a con-cause—as a part of the total cause.—Ed.
The connotation of Time, by abstract terms, is a circumstance almost always overlooked, but of which the observation is of the utmost importance to accuracy of thought.
When we have invented a number of marks to be taken in pairs, as like, like; equal, equal; antecedent, consequent; master, servant; husband, wife; father, son; owner, property; author, book; cause, effect; and so on; we have occasion for a name by which to speak of that class of names. We have invented such a name. We call those terms “Relative Terms.”
The word “Relative,” thus belongs to that class of names, which have been called “Names of Names.” As man, tree, stone, are names of things, of those clusters which we call objects; as red, green, hard, soft, are names of sensations; as courage, wisdom, 86 anger, love, are names of complex ideas arbitrarily composed; so adjective is the name of one class of names, verb the name of another class of names; syllable, is the name of one part of a word, letter of another; and so, also, relative is the name of the class of words which have this peculiarity, that they are taken in pairs. Thus, father and son, are relative terms; prior and posterior, are relative terms; like and like, are relative terms; so equal, equal; unequal, unequal; brother, brother; friend, friend; and so on.
Relative itself corresponds with the names which it marks, in its being one of a pair; of that species of pairs, which are formed by a double use of the same word, as like, like. When we say of father and son, that they are relative terms, we mean that father is relative to son, and son relative to father.