Excerpt from The Fundamental Concepts of Modern Philosophic Thought: Critically and Historically Considered In every instance the question is always curious and often instructive, What was the popular and general meaning Of the term before it crystallized into its special and fixed meaning? Or, if it were originally a term of the schools, by what steps of transition did it proceed from one meaning to another, till finally it took on a signification which was the opposite of that which it originally bore, or till two correlated terms completely interchanged their significations? The remark of Cole ridge is often repeated, that there are cases in which more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign. This is emphatically true, and more; for, in cases not a few, the history of a word is the history of an actual campaign of patient research or active controversy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.