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Full Idea
Men at first unduly multiplied the names of individual things, owing to their failure to know the genera and species, but later made too few genera and species, owing to their failure to have considered beings in all their differences.
Gist of Idea
Men started with too few particular names, but later had too few natural kind names
Source
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [1754], Part I)
Book Ref
Rousseau,Jean-Jacques: 'The Basic Political Writings', ed/tr. Cress,Donald A. [Hackett 1987], p.51
A Reaction
The fact that two leopards differ is not a good enough reason to assign them to two different general terms. Adjectives can do all the necessary modification. The single general term acknowledges something important.
| 8153 | By knowing one piece of clay or gold, you know all of clay or gold [Anon (Upan)] |
| 12265 | All water is the same, because of a certain similarity [Aristotle] |
| 19761 | Men started with too few particular names, but later had too few natural kind names [Rousseau] |
| 6939 | What is true of one piece of copper is true of another (unlike brass) [Peirce] |
| 12681 | There are natural kinds of processes [Ellis] |
| 15798 | Kinds are arrangements of dispositions [Fetzer] |
| 6170 | Natural kinds are defined by their real essence, as in gold having atomic number 79 [Rowlands] |
| 6773 | If F is a universal appearing in a natural law, then Fs form a natural kind [Bird] |
| 17478 | Maybe two kinds are the same if there is no change of entropy on isothermal mixing [Hendry] |