We must distinguish, in fact, between the peculiar associations of the proper name and the commonly recognised meaning of the general name.  This is why proper names are not in the dictionary.  Such a name as London, to be sure, or Napoleon Buonaparte, has a significance not merely local; still, it is accidental.  These names are borne by other places and persons than those that have rendered them famous.  There are Londons in various latitudes, and, no doubt, many Napoleon Buonapartes in Louisiana; and each name has in its several denotations an altogether different suggestiveness.  For its suggestiveness is in each application determined by the peculiarities of the place or person denoted; it is not given to the different places (or to the different persons) because they have certain characteristics in common.

However, the scientific grounds of the doctrine that proper names are non-connotative, are these:  The peculiarities that distinguish an individual person or thing are admitted to be infinite, and anything less than a complete enumeration of these peculiarities may fail to distinguish and identify the individual.  For, short of a complete enumeration of them, the description may be satisfied by two or more individuals; and in that case the term denoting them, if limited by such a description, is not a proper but a general name, since it is applicable to two or more in the same sense.  The existence of other individuals to whom it applies may be highly improbable; but, if it be logically possible, that is enough.  On the other hand, the enumeration of infinite peculiarities is certainly impossible.  Therefore proper names have no assignable connotation.  The only escape from this reasoning lies in falling back upon time and place, the principles of individuation, as constituting the connotation of proper names.  Two things cannot be at the same time in the same place:  hence ’the man who was at a certain spot on the bridge of Lodi at a certain instant in a certain year’ suffices to identify Napoleon Buonaparte for that instant.  Supposing no one else to have borne the name, then, is this its connotation?  No one has ever thought so.  And, at any rate, time and place are only extrinsic determinations (suitable indeed to events like the battle of Lodi, or to places themselves like London); whereas the connotation of a general term, such as ‘sheep,’ consists of intrinsic qualities.  Hence, then, the scholastic doctrine ’that individuals have no essence’ (see chap. xxii.  Sec. 9), and Hamilton’s dictum ’that every concept is inadequate to to the individual,’ are justified.

General names, when used as proper names, lose their connotation, as Euxine or Newfoundland.

Singular terms, other than Proper, have connotation; either in themselves, like the singular pronouns ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘it,’ which are general in their applicability, though singular in application; or, derivatively, from the general names that combine to form them, as in ‘the first Emperor of the French’ or the ’Capital of the British Empire.’