It is disputed whether abstract names are connotative. The question is a confused one: it is like asking whether the name of a town is municipal. An abstract name is the name of a connotation as a separate object of thought or reference, conceived or spoken of in abstraction from individual accidents. Strictly speaking it is notative rather than connotative: it cannot be said to have a connotation because it is itself the symbol of what is called the connotation of a general name.[4]
The distinction between abstract names and concrete names is virtually a grammatical distinction, that is, a distinction in mode of predication. We may use concrete names or abstract names at our pleasure to express the same meaning. To say that "John is a timid man" is the same thing as saying that "Timidity is one of the properties or characteristics or attributes of John". "Pride and cruelty generally go together;" "Proud men are generally cruel men."
General names are predicable of individuals because they possess certain attributes: to predicate the possession of those attributes is the same thing as to predicate the general name.
Abstract forms of predication are employed in common speech quite as frequently as concrete, and are, as we shall see, a great source of ambiguity and confusion.
[Footnote 1:] It has been somewhat too hastily assumed on the authority of Mansel (Note to Aldrich, pp. 16, 17) that Mill inverted the scholastic tradition in his use of the word Connotative. Mansel puts his statement doubtfully, and admits that there was some licence in the use of the word Connotative, but holds that in Scholastic Logic an adjective was said to "signify primarily the attribute, and to connote or signify secondarily (προσσημαίνειν ) the subject of inhesion". The truth is that Mansel's view was a theory of usage not a statement of actual usage, and he had good reason for putting it doubtfully.
As a matter of fact, the history of the distinction follows the simple type of increasing precision and complexity, and Mill was in strict accord with standard tradition. By the Nominalist commentators on the Summulæ of Petrus Hispanus certain names, adjectives grammatically, are called Connotativa as opposed to Absoluta, simply because they have a double function. White is connotative as signifying both a subject, such as Socrates, of whom "whiteness" is an attribute, and an attribute "whiteness": the names "Socrates" and "whiteness" are Absolute, as having but a single signification. Occam himself speaks of the subject as the primary signification, and the attribute as the secondary, because the answer to "What is white?" is "Something informed with whiteness," and the subject is in the nominative case while the attribute is in an oblique case (Logic, part I. chap. x.). Later on we find that Tataretus (Expositio in Summulas, A.D. 1501), while mentioning (Tract. Sept. De Appellationibus) that it is a matter of dispute among Doctores whether a connotative name connotat the subject or the attribute, is perfectly explicit in his own definition, "Terminus connotativus est qui præter illud pro quo supponit connotat aliquid adjacere vel non adjacere rei pro qua supponit" (Tract. Sept. De Suppositionibus). And this remained the standard usage as long as the distinction remained in logical text-books. We find it very clearly expressed by Clichtoveus, a Nominalist, quoted as an authority by Guthutius in his Gymnasium Speculativum, Paris, 1607 (De Terminorum Cognitione, pp. 78-9). "Terminus absolutus est, qui solum illud pro quo in propositione supponit, significat. Connotativus autem, qui ultra idipsum, aliud importat." Thus man and animal are absolute terms, which simply stand for (supponunt pro) the things they signify. White is a connotative name, because "it stands for (supponit pro) a subject in which it is an accident: and beyond this, still signifies an accident, which is in that subject, and is expressed by an abstract name". Only Clichtoveus drops the verb connotat, perhaps as a disputable term, and says simply ultra importat.
So in the Port Royal Logic (1662), from which possibly Mill took the distinction: "Les noms qui signifient les choses comme modifiées, marquant premièrement et directement la chose, quoique plus confusément, et indirectement le mode, quoique plus distinctement, sont appelés adjectifs ou connotatifs; comme rond, dur, juste, prudent" (part i. chap ii.).
What Mill did was not to invert Scholastic usage but to revive the distinction, and extend the word connotative to general names on the ground that they also imported the possession of attributes. The word has been as fruitful of meticulous discussion as it was in the Renaissance of Logic, though the ground has changed. The point of Mill's innovation was, premising that general names are not absolute but are applied in virtue of a meaning, to put emphasis on this meaning as the cardinal consideration. What he called the connotation had dropped out of sight as not being required in the Syllogistic Forms. This was as it were the point at which he put in his horn to toss the prevalent conception of Logic as Syllogistic.
The real drift of Mill's innovation has been obscured by the fact that it was introduced among the preliminaries of Syllogism, whereas its real usefulness and significance belongs not to Syllogism in the strict sense but to Definition. He added to the confusion by trying to devise forms of Syllogism based on connotation, and by discussing the Axiom of the Syllogism from this point of view. For syllogistic purposes, as we shall see, Aristotle's forms are perfect, and his conception of the proposition in extension the only correct conception. Whether the centre of gravity in Consistency Logic should not be shifted back from Syllogism to Definition, the latter being the true centre of consistency, is another question. The tendency of Mill's polemic was to make this change. And possibly the secret of the support it has recently received from Mr. Bradley and Mr. Bosanquet is that they, following Hegel, are moving in the same direction.