[An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. by John Locke]@TWC D-Link bookAn Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. CHAPTER XXV 3/8
But where languages have failed to give correlative names, there the relation is not always so easily taken notice of.
CONCUBINE is, no doubt, a relative name, as well as wife: but in languages where this and the like words have not a correlative term, there people are not so apt to take them to be so, as wanting that evident mark of relation which is between correlatives, which seem to explain one another, and not to be able to exist, but together.
Hence it is, that many of those names, which, duly considered, do include evident relations, have been called EXTERNAL DENOMINATIONS.
But all names that are more than empty sounds must signify some idea, which is either in the thing to which the name is applied, and then it is positive, and is looked on as united to and existing in the thing to which the denomination is given; or else it arises from the respect the mind finds in it to something distinct from it, with which it considers it, and then it includes a relation. 3.
Some seemingly absolute Terms contain Relations. Another sort of relative terms there is, which are not looked on to be either relative, or so much as external denominations: which yet, under the form and appearance of signifying something absolute in the subject, do conceal a tacit, though less observable, relation.
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