474 G. VAILATI : contrasts and differences of opinion where there are only differences in the manner of representing and characterising the same facts and the same doctrines. This danger is, however, rendered still more serious by another circumstance, which especially concerns those modi- fications of technical philosophical language which aim at expressing new ideas or new distinctions. These modifications often present themselves, in the first place, not in the form of new terms, but in that of new phrases, which, though composed of terms, each of which, in other phrases, continues to be understood in its usual sense, nevertheless assumes a different technical meaning in the phrase in question. That the appearance of technical phrases of this kind should precede the introduction of technical terms, properly so called, is a natural consequence of the fact that the in- troduction of a new word, or the assignment of a new mean- ing to a term already in use, represents a greater divergency from ordinary usage than the attribution of a special mean- ing to some new combination of terms already in use, without any alteration of the meaning of these terms in any other combinations. Among the words which lend themselves most easily to serve in this way the aims of philosophic language, appear, in the first place, as is natural, those which are called by logicians " syncategorematic," i.e. those words which, like pre- positions and articles, differ from the other parts of speech, precisely in this : viz. : that their meaning more strictly depends on, and is more subject to vary with, the contexts in which they appear. It is only later, and when the meaning of the phrases thus introduced is sufficiently important to render their frequent repetition inevitable, that the need arises of some " categore- matic " term (a noun or a verb) to express in a more concise way the idea or the distinction in question, i.e. the need arises of having at one's disposal, for such an object, not only technical phrases, but also technical terms. The cases in which such terms are not introduced by the same philosopher who introduced the use of the correspond- ing phrase, may induce the imprudent historian, who is more preoccupied with the changes in meaning of a given word than with the various expressions and the development of a given idea or distinction, to attribute the discovery of these last, not to the philosopher to whom it is really due, but to the one who characterises it for the first time by a special technical denomination.
