§ 6. The fourth principal division of names, is into _positive_ and _negative_. Positive, as _man_, _tree_, _good_; negative, as _not-many_, _not-tree_, _not-good_. To every positive concrete name, a corresponding negative one might be framed. After giving a name to any one thing, or to any plurality of things, we might create a second name which should be a name of all things whatever except that particular thing or things. These negative names are employed whenever we have occasion to speak collectively of all things other than some thing or class of things. When the positive name is connotative, the corresponding negative name is connotative likewise; but in a peculiar way, connoting not the presence but the absence of an attribute. Thus, _not-white_ denotes all things whatever except white things; and connotes the attribute of not possessing whiteness. For the non-possession of any given attribute is also an attribute, and may receive a name as such; and thus negative concrete names may obtain negative abstract names to correspond to them.
Names which are positive in form are often negative in reality, and others are really positive though their form is negative. The word _inconvenient_, for example, does not express the mere absence of convenience; it expresses a positive attribute, that of being the cause of discomfort or annoyance. So the word _unpleasant_, notwithstanding its negative form, does not connote the mere absence of pleasantness, but a less degree of what is signified by the word _painful_, which, it is hardly necessary to say, is positive. _Idle_, on the other hand, is a word which, though positive in form, expresses nothing but what would be signified either by the phrase _not working_, or by the phrase _not disposed to work_; and _sober_, either by _not drunk_ or by _not drunken_.
There is a class of names called _privative_. A privative name is equivalent in its signification to a positive and a negative name taken together; being the name of something which has once had a particular attribute, or for some other reason might have been expected to have it, but which has it not. Such is the word _blind_, which is not equivalent to _not seeing_, or to _not capable of seeing_, for it would not, except by a poetical or rhetorical figure, be applied to stocks and stones. A thing is not usually said to be blind, unless the class to which it is most familiarly referred, or to which it is referred on the particular occasion, be chiefly composed of things which can see, as in the case of a blind man, or a blind horse; or unless it is supposed for any reason that it ought to see; as in saying of a man, that he rushed blindly into an abyss, or of philosophers or the clergy that the greater part of them are blind guides. The names called privative, therefore, connote two things: the absence of certain attributes, and the presence of others, from which the presence also of the former might naturally have been expected.