If these points were remembered, there would be less absurd employment of the grammatical categories of one group of languages to systematise another. Greek and Sanscrit grammar plays sad havoc with the organism of a Semitic tongue, and it is not less out of place as a schema for delineating e. g. South African dialect. Isolated words even in an Indo-Germanic language--even, we may say, in such a language as English--are still fractional, and do not get life and individuality except in their context. And it needs but a little experience to show how various that individuality may be. It needs perhaps still more meditation to realise that it is in this individuality that the real life of language lies: in the words said and written to express the thought of a personality. But, first, because language has its material and mechanical side, and secondly, because in civilised countries it further acquires a more stereotyped mechanism in written and printed language, its parts tend to gain a pseudo-independence. It is one aim of a philosophical dictionary to restore the organic interconnexion which in the mere sequence of vocables in juxtaposition is apt to be lost. What we call the meaning of a word is something which carries us beyond that mere word,--which restores the connexions which have been broken off and forgotten. In the form of a dictionary, of course, this can only be done piece-meal: but if each piece is done thoroughly, it can hardly fail to bring out certain comprehensive connexions. The mere word seems a simple thing; and one is at first disposed to get rid of its difficulty by substituting a so-called synonym. But a deeper study reveals the fact that an exact synonym is a thing one can no more find than two peas which are absolutely indistinguishable. A synonym is only a practical _pis aller_. But every word is really as it were a point in an infinitely complex organic life, with its essence or meaning determined by the currents to and fro which meet in it.
Words as we see them _prima facie_ in a printed page do look separate entities. They stand, one here and another there, in a quasi-extension, with marks of direction and connexion pointing from one to another, but of connexion apparently extraneous to the more solid points which are represented by nouns and verbs, or names of substances, actions, and attributes. Results, as they are, of that practical analysis which the need of writing down language has led to, they are treated as complete wholes, which by the speaker are forced into certain temporary connexions. But this is an illusion which, because a thing changes its relationships, assumes that it can exist out of all relationships whatever. Every word of Language is such an abstraction, isolated from its context. But amid these contexts there are certain similarities: identical elements are detected: and these identical elements are the common names of language, the terms of general significance. In all cases, however, what an utterance of language describes or expresses is a definite individual event or scene, conceived as a concrete of several parts. Each separate vocable is a contribution to the total: a step towards the real redintegration of the whole out of its several parts. But the total itself--the content of fact in any single sentence--is only an abstraction,--a part of the universe which human interest and need have isolated from the comprehensive scope of things. Thus, in two degrees, we may say, the picture produced in the sentence falls short of the truth of things. Each statement is an arbitrary or accidental cutting out of the totality: each element of the cutting is dependent on that abstraction, and relative to it. But--as in a given group of speech, the same sets of circumstances will naturally be selected, and tend to recur again and again,--the terms which describe them will acquire a certain association with the objects, and will come to be called the common names of these agents, acts, and qualities. They denote or 'represent' the things and acts, conceived however in certain aspects and relations, and not in their entirety and totality of nature.