[It is obvious, that the third function includes the act of comparing one object with another. In a note (for, not to interrupt the argument, I avail myself of this most useful contrivance,) I have shown, that the act of comparing supposes in the comparing faculty, certain inherent forms, that is, modes of reflecting not referable to the objects reflected on, but pre-determined by the constitution and (as it were) mechanism of the Understanding itself. And under some one or other of these forms,[96] the resemblances and differences must be subsumed in order to be conceivable, and _a fortiori_ therefore in order to be comparable. The senses do not compare, but merely furnish the materials for comparison. But this the reader will find explained in the note; and will now cast his eye back to the sentence immediately preceding this parenthesis.]
Now when a person speaking to us of any particular Object or Appearance refers it by means of some common character to a known class (which he does in giving it a Name), we say, that we understand him; that is, we understand his words. The Name of a thing, in the original sense of the word Name, (_nomen_, νουμενον, το _intelligible_, _id quod intelligitur_) expresses that which is _understood_ in an appearance, that which we place (or make to _stand_) _under_ it, as the condition of its real existence, and in proof that it is not an accident of the senses, or affection of the individual, not a phantom or _apparition_, that is, an appearance that is _only_ an appearance. (See Gen. ii. 19, 20, and in Psalm xx. 1, and in many other places of the Bible, the identity of _nomen_ with _numen_, that is, invisible power and presence, the _nomen substantivum_ of all real objects, and the ground of their reality, independently of the affections of sense in the percipient). In like manner, in a connected succession of names, as the speaker passes from the one to the other, we say that we can understand his _discourse_ (_discursio intellectûs, discursus_, his passing rapidly from one thing to another). Thus, in all instances, it is words, names, or, if images, yet images used as words or names, that are the only and exclusive subjects of Understanding. In no instance do we understand a thing in itself; but only the name to which it is referred. Sometimes indeed, when several classes are recalled conjointly, we identify the words with the object--though by courtesy of idiom rather than in strict propriety of language. Thus we may say that we _understand_ a rainbow, when recalling successively the several Names for the several sorts of colours, we know that they are to be applied to one and the same _phenomenon_, at once distinctly and simultaneously; but even in common speech we should not say this of a single colour. No one would say he understands red or blue. He _sees_ the colour, and had seen it before in a vast number and variety of objects; and he understands the _word_ red, as referring his fancy or memory to this his collective experience.