iiiUi.^;jii3'jtJi*L'i CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library *" essay concerning human understanding 3 1924 016 872 172 a Cornell University 7 Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924016872172 LOCKE'S ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING ERASER VOL. II. JSonJort HENRY FROWDE Oxford University Press Warehouse Amen Corner, E.C. MACMILLAX & CO., 66 FIFTH AVENUE AN ESSAY CONCERNING lUMAN UNDERSTANDING JOHN LOCKE COLLATED AND ANNOTATED, WITH PROLEGOMENA, BIOGRAPHICAL, CRITICAL, AND HISTORICAL By ALEXANDER CAMPBELL ERASER HON. D.C.L., OXFORD EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II 0;cfor5 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS M.DCCC.XCIV €>;cfor& PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS BY HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING. BOOK III. OF WORDS. CHAP. PAGE~ I. Of Words or Language in General ..... 3 II. Of the Signification of Words . . ... 8 ' III. Of General Terms .... -14 IV. Of the Names of Simple Ideas 32 V. Of the Names of Mixed Modes and Relations . . 43 VI. Of the Names of Substances .... . . 56 VII. Of Particles .98 VIII. Of Abstract and Concrete Terms ... . loi IX. Of the Imperfection of Words ...... 104 X. Of the Abuse of Words 122 XI. Of the Remedies of the foregoing Imperfection and ~ Abuses 148 BOOK IV. OF KNOWLEDGE AND PROBABILITY. 1. Of Knowledge in General . . . . ^ . . . 167 II. Of the Degrees of our Knowledge . y". . . .176 HI. Of the Extent of Human Knowledge . .^,- . .190 IV. Of the Reality of our Knowledge . .^ . . 226 V. Of Truth in General . , '' . . . . . . 244 vi Contents. XX. Of Wrong Assent, or Error XXI. Or THE Division of the Sciences PAGE VI. Of Universal Propositions: their Truth and Certainty. 251 VII. Of Maxims ... . . . . 267 VIII. Of Trifling Propositions ... • ■ • ^9^ - IX. Of our Threefold Knowledge of Existence . • 3°3 He. Of our Knowledge of the Existence of a God . . • 3°^ ^ XI. Of our Knowledge of the Existence of Other Things . 325 XII. Of the Improvement of our Knowledge .... 341 XIII. Some Other Considerations Concerning our Knowledge . 357 XIV. Of Judgment . , ... 360 \ XV. Of Probability ... ■ . 3^3 ; XVI. Of the Degrees of Assent .... . . 369 XVII. Of Reason [and Syllogism] ..... 385 /xviii. Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces 415 ' XIX. [Of Enthusiasm] 428 442 460 Indices (A) To the Text of the Essay . . . 467 (B) To THE Prolegomena and Annotations . . 483 ERRATA Page 72, marginal analysis, yir substances rend Hens ,, 162, last line, mseri not defoiv to have „ 23o',yor Bk. II. ch. xxiii^ r^at^ Book II. ch. xxi. ,, 291', last line but one, for ready rrarf really , 378^, yir sect. xii. read sect. xiii. BOOK III OF WORDS VOL. II- SYNOPSIS OF THE THIRD BOOK. After teaching in the Second Book that the only ideas to which a human mind can attain are composed of simple ideas or phenomena, presented in ' sensation ' and ' reflection,' as attributes of substances ; and that even oui loftiest thoughts are concerned only with the modes of those phenomena, the substances in which they appear, and their relations — Locke, in the Third Book, supplements this teaching, by unfolding the connexion between ideas oi each sort and verbal signs, on which ideas depend, words being means for enabling men to regard ideas, in themselves particular, as general or universal (ch. iii). The names of simple ideas and of their simple modes ; the names of mixed modes and of relations ; and the names of the different sorts of substances, have each something peculiar, regarded as signs of ideas (chh. iv, V, vi). All names of simple ideas and of ideas of substances ' intimate real existence ' ; but the common names of simple ideas signify the real essence, as well as the nominal, of the qualities that the names stand for, while the common names of substances can express only the nominal essence of the species within which men place the substance. Names of mixed modes, again, and of all ideas of relation, signify only the essences that men have annexed to the names. Simple ideas, moreover, are undefinable, and their names are of all others the least liable to ambiguity. Mixed modes, on the other hand, being formed arbitrarily by men, and sometimes very complex, their names are apt to be used ambiguously, on account of this complexity, and also because they have no absolute standard. The common names of substances, the most important of all, are determined by our limited experience of qualities, and can signify therefore only the connotation we have annexed to the names, not the real essence of the particular substances denoted. On the whole, words are naturally imperfect signs of ideas (ch. ix), especially of mixed modes, and above all of substances ; and this natural imperfection of words is aggravated by ' wilful faults and neglects ' of which men are guilty when they employ them, some of which are illustrated in detail (ch. x). The Book closes (ch. xi) with an account of five ' remedies ' for the ' inconveniences ' caused by the natural and acquired imperfection of language. ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING BOOK III. CHAPTER I. OF WORDS OR LANGUAGE IN GENERAL. I. God, having designed man for a sociable creature, made book iii; him not only with an inclination, and under a necessity to ~^*~ have fellowship with those of his own kind, but furnished him ,, . ' ' '^ Man fitted also with language, which was to be the great instrument and to form common tie of socie ty .^ Man, therefore, had by nature his sounds!^ organs so fashioned, as to be fit to frame articulate sounds, which we call words. But this was not enough to produce language ; for parrots, and several other birds, will be taught to make articulate sounds distinct enough, which yet by no means are capable of language. a. Besides articulate sounds, therefore, it was further To use necessary that he should be able to use these sounds as signs so^unds as of internal conceptions ; and to make them stand as marks Signs of for the iHeas within his own mind ^, whereby they might be niaae known to others, and the thoughts of men's minds be conveyed from one to another ^. ' That words immediately signify for conveying thought from one man only his ideas who uses them, is more to another; they also enable each fully set forth in ch. ii. § a. man to exercise his higher faculties, ' But words are needed not only the development and exercise of B 2 BOOK III Chap. I. To make them general Signs. To make them signify the absence of positive Ideas. Words ultimately 4 Essay concerning Human Understanding. 3. But neither was this sufficient to make words so useful as they ought to be. It is not enough for the perfection of language, that sounds can be made signs of ideas, unless those signs can be so made use of as to comprehend several particular things : for the multiplication of words would have perplexed their use, had every particular thing need of a distinct name to be signified by. [^ To remedy this incon- venience, language had yet a further improvement in the use of general terms, whereby one word was made to mark a multitude of particular existences : which advantageous use of sounds was obtained only by the difference of the ideas they were made signs of: those names becoming general, which are made to stand for general idjMs^, and those re- maining particular, where the ideas they are used for are partictdar?[ 4. ^ Besides these names which stand for ideas, there be other words which men make use of, not to signify any idea, but the want or absence of some ideas, simple or complex, or all ideas together ; such as are nihil in Latin, and in English, ignorance and barrenness. All which negative or privative words cannot be said properly to belong to, or signify no ideas: for then they would be perfectly insignificant sounds; but they relate to positive ideas, and signify their absence * 5. It may also lead us a little towards the original^ of all which depends upon the use of signs that can be perceived by the senses. Yet thought is not constituted by, nor identical with, language, which on the contrary is originated and formed by thought. ' Added in the second edition. ^ * Les termes generaux ne servent pas seulement a la perfection des langues, mais meme ils sont neces- saires pour leur constitution essen- tielle. Car, si par les choses particulieres on entend les individuelles, il serait impossibles de parler, s'il n'y avait que des noms fropres, et point d'appel- laiifs ; c'est-a dire, s'il n'y avait des mots que pour les individus.' {Nou- veaiix Essais.) ^ In the first edition, this section commenced thus : — ' Words then are made to be signs of our ideas, and are general or particular as the ideas thej stand for are general or particular.' The sentence was omitted in the fol- lowing editions. ' Cf Bk. II. ch. viii. §5 1-6. Nega- tive terms are not necessarily mean- ingless. Some of the most important philosophical meanings are conveyed by them, e. g. ' infinite.' ' original,' i. e. origin, meaning exordium, — origin in the order of succession, which may be discovered in the 'historical plain ' method, over- looking the logically implied conditions of percipient intelligence in the abstract. Of Words or Language in General. 5 our notions and knowledge, if we remark how great a de-BOOKiii. pendence our words have on common sensible ideas ; arid ~"~ 1k)w those which are made use of to stand for actions and , . j ' .^ — _" — _ - - ■ - - _ denved notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence, from such and from obvious sensible ideas are transferred to more gensSie^ abstruse significations, and made to stand for ideas that come ideas.- not under the cognizance of our senses ; v. g. to imagine, apprehend, comprehend, adhere, conceive, instil, disgust, disturb- ance, tranquillity. Sec, are all words taken from the operations of sensible things, and applied to certain inodes_sf_ thinking. Spirit, in its primary signification, is breath ; angel, a messenger : and I doubt not but, if we could trace them to ' their sources, we should find, in all languages, the names which stand for things that fall not under our senses to have had their first rise from sensible ideas ^. By which we may y give some kind of guess what kind of notions they were, and whence derived, which filled their minds who were the first beginners of languages ^, and how nature, even in the naming of things, unawares suggested to men the originals and principles of all their knowledge : whilst, to give names that might make known to others any operations they felt in themselves, or any other ideas that came not under their senses, they were fain to borrow words from ordinary known ideas of sensation ^, by that means to make others the more easily to conceive those operations they experimented in themselves, which made no outward sensible appearances ; and then, when they had got known and agreed names to signify those internal operations of their own minds, they were sufficiently furnished to make known by words all their ' This is only what might be ex- government, as the artificial result of pected, if the external ' senses precede contract or agreement — which became reflection ' in the development of a the favourite theory in the eighteenth human mind. Moreover there are century, rather than as phenomena apparent exceptions. Maine de Biran that have been unconsciously evolved notes, that in what relates to the idea under natural law. See Condillac, of power and causality, the language Essai sur VOrigine des Connoissances originally applied to the mental opera- Humaines, Second Partie, sect, pre- tions has been transferred by analogy miere. to the world of sense. ' 'ideas of sensation,' i.e. pheno- ^ Locke sometimes (as here) speaks mena presented to the senses by ot language, and always of civil material substances. 6 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. other ideas ; since they could consist of nothing but either of "*•" outward^ sensible perceptions, or of the inward^ operations of ^"''''' ^' their minds about them ; we having, as has been proved, no ideas at all, but what originally come either from sensible objects without, or what we feel within ourselves, from the inward workings of our own spirits, of which we are conscious to ourselves within. Distribu- 6. But to understand better the use and force of Language ^, subjects to ^^ subservient to instruction and knowledge, it will be con- be treated veuicnt to Consider : First, To what it is that names, in the use of language, an immediately applied. Secondly, Since all (except proper) names are general, and so stand not particularly for this or that single thing, but for sorts and ranks of things, it will be necessary to consider, in the next place, what the sorts and kinds, or, if you rather like the Latin names, what the Species atid Genera of things are, wherein they consist, and how they come to be made ^- These being (as they ought) well looked into, we shall the better come to find the right use of words ; the natural advantages and defects of language ; and the remedies that ought to be used, to avoid the inconveniences of obscurity or uncertainty in the signification of words : without which it is impossible to discourse with any clearness or order concerning know- ledge : which, being conversant about propositions *, and ^ Locke throughout presupposes the the wheels went, and thither was distinction of 'outward 'and' inward,' their Spirit to go; for the Spirit ol as given from the first, — the qualities the living creature was in the wheels and powers of extended things pre- also.' {Aids to Reflection. Preface.) sented in the simple ideas of the five = ' Abstract (general) ideas,' and senses, in contrast to the operations their relation to words, form the of the ' thinking substance,' presented chief subject of the third Book, in our ideas of reflection. His ' simple 'Mental 'propositions,' or judg- ideas' are virtually the recognised ments, are the units of ' knowledge,' ' qualities ' of individual substances. as distinguished from mere ' ideas,' 2 Words, Coleridge says, are ' living which must enter into them, with which —the wheels of the intellect ; such as the second Book was concerned in Ezekiel beheld in the visions of God. preparation for the theory of know- Whithersoever the Spirit was to go ledge in the fourth Book. Of Words and Language in General. those most commonly universal ones ^, has greater connexion book hi. with words than perhaps is suspected. These considerations, therefore, shall be the matter of the following chapters ^- Chap. I. ' The attainment of new and true universal propositions, affirmative and negative, is the chief end of all purely intellectual activity ; but, as the condi- tion of its attainment, capacity for being universalised is presupposed, on the part of the things about which men reason. "^ ' Some parts of that third Book, concerning Words, though the thoughts were easy and clear enough, yet cost me more pains to express than all the rest of my Essay. And therefore I shall not much wonder, if there be in some places of it obscurity and doubtfulness.' (tocke to Molyneux, Jan. 20, 1693.) Chap. II. CHAPTER II. OF THE SIGNIFICATION OF WORDS. BOOK III. I. Man, though he have great variety of thoughts, and such from which others as well as himself might receive profit and delight ; vet they are all within his own breast, invisible Words are , , . ^^ ' -^ / sensible and hidden from others, nor can of themselves be made to Signs, appear. The comfort and advantage of society not being to necessary ^^ ^ j o for Comi be had without communication of thoughts, it was necessary of'ideas't" ^^'^^ ^^'^ should find out some external sensible signs, whereof those invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others ^. For this purpose nothing was so fit, either for plenty or quickness, as those articulate sounds, which with so much ease and variety he found himself able to make. Thus we may conceive how words, which were by nature so well adapted to that purpose, came to be made use of by men as the signs of their ideas ; not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men ; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily ^ the mark of such an idea. ' Leibniz {Nouveaux Essais) dwells taneous evolution, determined under on the illustration the peculiar genius natural laws, does not necessarily of a people receives from the qualities imply that the connexion of an idea which they select, as the basis of with a particular sign is other than their classifications of things. Topo- arbitrary. This is proved by the fact graphical nomenclatures are largely of a plurality of languages Locke's determined by this consideration. emphatic recognition of 'arbitrariness' See Prof Veitch's Border History and in this connexion probably suggested Poetry, pp. 16-18 Berkeley's metaphor of a divine visual Locke s tendency to see in Ian- language, and his favourite conception guage the issue of arbitrary contract of the ' arbitrariness ' of all natural {tx institulo) rather than of spon- laws. The Significance of Words. 9 The use, then, of words, is to be sensible marks of ideas ; and book hi. the ideas they stand for are their proper and immediate ~**~ signification. ^"^^- "' 2. The use men have of these marks being either to record Words, their own thoughts, for the assistance of their own memory ^ ; Imme'dLte or, as it were, to bring out their ideas ^, and lay them before Significa- the view of others : words, in their primary or immediate the ' signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind f?/?,^"^''''^, 77 7 1-1 Signs of him that tises them, how imperfectly soever or carelessly those his ideas ideas are collected from the things which they are supposed ^em"^^^ to represent ^- When a man speaks to another, it is that he may be understood : and the end of speech is, that those sounds, as marks, may make known his ideas to the hearer. That then which words are the marks of are the ideas of the speaker : nor can any one apply them as marks, immediately, to anything else but the ideas that he himself hath : for this would be to make them signs of his own conceptions, and yet apply them to other ideas ; which would be to make them signs and not signs of his ideas at the same time ; and so in^ effect to have no signification at all. Words being voluntary signs, they cannot be voluntary signs imposed by him on things he knows not. That would be to make them signs of nothing, sounds without signification. A man cannot make ' Not only, nor chiefly, ' memory,' communication of ideas to others, — indispensable to the activity of being thus the two uses of language discursive reason. ' The concept here noted. formed by an abstraction of the re- ' In representing words as, ' in sembling from the non-resembling their primary or immediate significa- qualities of objects, would again fall tion,' signs of ' his ideas who uses back into the confusion and infinitude them,' Locke does not exclude the from which it has been called out, beliefs and knowledge of him who uses were it not rendered permanent for them — belief and knowledge presup- consciousness by being fixed and rati- posing ideas. Each man's words fied in a verbal sign.' (Hamilton.) But represent things, as they are regarded Lockeis apt to disparage generalisation by his individual mind. Cf Hobbes, as no more than a means for relieving Computation or Logic, ch. ii. § 5 ; also memory; andtosuspect ' generalities,' Mill's Logic, Bk. I. ch. ii. § i. When as a hindrance to observation of the Locke speaks of words as signs of properties and powers of individual ideas, it must be remembered that things. his ' ideas ' include perceived pheno- ^ ' bring out their ideas,' i. e. com- mena (' simple ideas ') presented by municate them to other men — ' assist- substances, in external and internal ance of their own memory,' and sense. lo Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. his words the signs either of qualities in things, or of concep- -**- tions in the mind of another, whereof he has none in his own. Chap. II. .^..jj ^^ ^^^ ^^^^ .^^^^ ^^ j^j^ ^^^^ j^g cannot suppose them to correspond with the conceptions of another man ; nor can he use any signs for them : for thus they would be the signs of he knows not what, which is in truth to be the signs of nothing. But when he represents to himself other men's ideas by some of his own, if he consent to give them the same names that other men do, it is still to his own ideas ; to ideas that he has, and not to ideas that he has not. Examples 3. This is SO necessary in the use of language, that in this °'^*'"^ respect the knowing and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned, use the words they speak (with any meaning) all alike. They, in every man's mouth, stand for the ideas he has, and which he would express by them. A child having taken notice of nothing in the metal he hears called gold, but the bright shining yellow colour, he applies the word gold only to his own idea of that colour, and nothing else; and therefore calls the same colour in a peacock's tail gold. Another that hath better observed, adds to shining yellow great weight : and then the sound gold, when he uses it, stands for a complex idea of a shining yellow and a very weighty substance. Another adds to those qualities fusibility : and then the word gold signifies to him a body, bright, yellow, fusible, and very heavy. Another adds malleability. Each of these uses equally the word gold, when they have occasion to express the idea which they have applied it to : but it is evident that each can apply it only to his own idea ; nor can he make it stand as a sign of such a complex idea as he has not. Words are 4. But though words, as they are used by men, can secretly properly and immediately signify nothing but the ideas that Fire7to' ^^^ ^"^ *^ ^'^'^^ °^ *^ speaker ; yet they in their thoughts the Ideas give them a secret reference to two other things, to beTn*^ •^'''^*' '^'^^^y ^'^^Ppose their words to be marks of the^ ideas other in the minds also of other men, with whom they commu- min"ds. nicate : for else they should talk in vain, and could not be understood, if the sounds they applied to one idea were such as by the hearer were applied to another, which is to speak The Significance of Words. 1 1 two languages. But in this men stand not usually to ex- book hi. amine, whether the idea they, and those they discourse with ~**~ have in their minds be the same : but think it enough that they use the word, as they imagine, in the common accepta- tion of that language ; in which they suppose that the idea they make it a sign of is precisely the same to which the understanding men of that country apply that name. 5. Secondly, Because men would not be thought to talk Secondly, barely of their own imagination ^, but of things as really they Re'iifty of are ; therefore_,the,y often suppose the words to stand also Things. for the reality of things''' . But this relating more particularly to~substances and their names, as perhaps the former does to simple ideas and modes, we shall speak of these two different ways of applying words more at large, when we come to treat of the names of mixed modes and substances in particular : though give me leave here to say, that it is a perverting the use of words, and brings unavoidable obscurity and confusion into their signification, whenever we make them stand for anything but those ideas we have in our own minds. 6. Concerning words, also, it is further to be considered : Words First, that they being immediately the signs of men's ideas, readUy and by that means the instruments whereby men com- excite , . . , , , Ideas of municate their conceptions, and express to one another those their thoughts and imaginations they have within their own breasts ; ot'Jects. there comes, by constant use, to be such a connexion between certain sounds and the ideas they stand for, that the names heard, almost as readily excite certain ideas as if the objects themselves, which are apt to produce them, did actually affect the senses. Which is manifestly so in all obvious sensible qualities, and in all substances that frequently and familiarly occur to us. 7. Secondly, That though the proper and immediate signi- Words are fication of words are ideas in the mind of the speaker, yet, ^ifhoHr ^ Locke's ' simple ideas ' — always for that the sound of the word stone assumed by him to be other than ' bare should be the sign of a stone, cannot imaginations,' or subjective fancies. be understood in any sense but this — 2 Which Hobbes denies. It is that he that hears it collects that he manifest, he says, that words ' are not that pronounces it thinks of a stone.' the signs of the things themselves; [Logic, ch. ii. § 5.) 12 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. because by familiar use from our cradles, we come to learn -^ certain articulate sounds very perfectly, and have them sf nific"' readily on our tongues, and always at hand in our memories, tion"'and but yet are not always careful to examine or settle their ^^^- significations perfectly i; it often happens that men, even when they would apply themselves to an attentive consider- ation, do set their thoughts more on words than things. Nay, because words are many of them learned before the ideas are known for which they stand: therefore some, not only children but men, speak several words no otherwise than parrots do, only because they have learned them, and have been accustomed to those sounds. But so far as words are of use and signification, so far is there a constant connexion between the sound and the idea, and a designation that the one stands for the other; without which application of them, they are nothing but so much insignificant noise. Their 8. Words, by long and familiar use, as has been said, come ^Jfn"'*''^^" to excite in men certain ideas so constantly and readily, that perfectly they are apt to suppose a natural connexion between them, not'the^' But that they signify only men's peculiar ideas, and that conse- jjy ^ perfect arbitrary imposition"^, is evident, in that they quence ol ■' ' -^ -^ -^ a natural oftcn fail to cxcitc in others (even that use the same language) [he same ideas we take them to be signs of : and every man has so inviolable a liberty to make words stand for what ideas he pleases, that no one hath the power to make others have the same ideas in their minds that he has, when they use the same words that he does. And therefore the great Augustus himself, in the possession of that power which ruled the world, acknowledged he could not make a new Latin word : which was as much as to say, that he could not arbitrarily appoint what idea any sound should be a sign of, ' This is what Leibniz called 'sym- interpretatio ; and Berkeley's metaphor bolical,' in contrast to ' intuitive ' of a ' language ' of sense, in virtue of thought ; in which the verbal symbol which nature is interpreiahle — the is substituted for the sensuous image. orderliness of its sequences being an Cf. Hume's Treatise, pt. i. sect. 7; expression of the supreme rational Stewart's Elements, ch. iv. sect. 2, on Will, which the terms of the sequence the analogy of ordinary language, so signify as words signify their mean- substituted, to signs in Algebra. ings by the arbitrary appointment of ' Hence by analogy Bacon's naturae men. connexion The Significance of Words. 13 in the mouths and common language of his subjects. It isBOOKiii. true, common use, by a tacit consent, appropriates certain ""**" sounds to certain ideas in all languages, which so far limits the signification of that sound, that unless a man applies it to the same idea, he does not speak properly : and let me add, that unless a man's words excite the same ideas in the hearer which he makes them stand for in speaking, he does not speak intelligibly. But whatever be the consequence of any man's using of words differently, either from their general meaning, or the particular sense of the person to whom he addresses them ; this is certain, their signification, in his use of them, is limited to his ideas, and they can be signs of nothing else^. ' ' Let us consider the false appear- and disputations, to imitate the wisdom ances that are imposed upon us by of the mathematicians, in setting down words, which are framed and applied in the very beginning the definitions according to the conceit and capacities of our words and terms, that others of the vulgar sort : and although v/e may know how we accept and under- think we govern our words, and pre- stand them, and whether they concur scribe it well, Loquendum ut vulgus, with us or no. For it cometh to pass, senlimdum ut sapientes ; yet certain it for want of this, that we are sure to is that words, as a Tartar's bow, do end there where we ought to have shoot back upon the understanding of begun, which is — in questions and the wisest, and mightily entangle and differences about words.' (Bacon, pervert the judgment. So that it is Advancement of Learnmg, Bk. II.) almost necessary, in all controversies Chap. III. The CHAPTER III. OF GENERAL TERMS. BOOK III. I. All things that exist being particulars, it may perhaps be thought reasonable that words, which ought to be con- formed to things, should be so too, — I mean in their signifi- greatest cation : but yet we find quite the contrary. The far greatest < Words are P^''^ of words that make all languages are general terms : general which has not been the effect of neglect or chance, but of terms. , . reason and necessity. That every q. First, It is impossible that every particular thing should Thing have a distinct peculiar name. For, the signification and use should of words depending on that connexion which the mind have a ,,.?, ,. Name for makcs between its ideas and the sounds it uses as signs of "oss^We""' ths"^' '^^ i^ necessary, in the application of names to things, that the mind should have distinct ideas of the things, and retain also the particular name that belongs to every one, with its peculiar appropriation to that idea. But it is be- yond the power of human capacity to frame and retain distinct ideas of all the particular things we meet with : every bird and beast men saw ; every tree and plant that affected the senses, could not find a place in the most capacious understanding. If it be looked on as an instance of a prodigious memory, that some generals have been able to call every soldier in their army by his proper name, we may easily find a reason why men have never attempted to give names to each sheep in their flock, or crow that flies over their heads ; much less to call every leaf of plants, or grain of sand that came in their way, by a peculiar name ^. ' Locke, here and elsewhere, speaks save excessive multiplication of proper of ' general terms ' as needed only to names. ' Now it is so far from being Of General Terms. 15 3. Secondly, If it were possible, it would yet be useless ;, book iii. because it would not serve to the chief end of language. — "*— Men would in vain heap up names of particular things, that *'"*''• "'• would not serve them to communicate their thoughts. Men would be learn names, and use them in talk with others, only that "s'^'ess, if -'it were they may be understood : which is then only done when, possible, by use or consent, the sound I make by the organs of speech, excites in another man's mind who hears it, the idea I apply it to in minCj when I speak it. This cannot be done by names applied to particular things ; whereof I alone having the ideas in my mind, the names of them could not be significant or intelligible to another, who was not acquainted with all those very particular things which had fallen under my notice ^. 4. Thirdly, But yet, granting this also feasible, (which I A distinct think is not,) yet a distinct name for every particular thing ^^^ '^°'^ would not be of any great use for the improvement of know- particular ledge : which, though founded in particular things, enlarges fitted for' itself by general views ^ ; to which things reduced into sorts, enlarge- under general names, are properly subservient. These, with know- the names belonging to them, come within some compass, '^''s^- true that general names are only make- It is from the beginning capable of shifts for an infinite number of proper extension to other individuals found names, that even the possession of an to possess the like qualities, infinite store of such names would not ^ The unintelligibility, for the pur- enable us to think one jot, or to frame pose of conveying meaning from one a single sentence. Each object being mind into another, of a language which a mere particular, no occasion for contained only proper names, is an predication could arise. . . . The in- obvious, but not the most significant, finite number of proper names would explanation of the fact, that, while the be like so many unmeaning numerical things that actually exist are par- marks put upon absolutely non-resem- ticular, most of our words are general, bling objects. We cannot say of five and the chief function of language is that it is six, or of any one number connected with generality, that it is another number.' (Prof Seth's ^ That generality, and ultimately Scottish Philosophy, p. 169.) Thus, as universality, is of the essence of Plato shows in his Thesetetus, philo- knowledge, explains why most terms sophical nominalism refutes itself. are general ; not the impossibility of From the moment of its first imposition sufficient economy of language if for a reason upon any one object, proper names exclusively were used, a name is potentially the name of Moreover capacity for being thus a class. It is from the first a general subjects of predication is implied term, a universal, though it may chance in things being even perceivable to be applied to only one individual. in sense. Chap. III. What things have proper Names, and why. 1 6 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. and do not multiply every moment, beyond what either the -^ mind can contain, or use requires. And therefore, in these i, men have for the most part stopped : but yet not so as to hinder themselves from distinguishing particular thmgs by appropriated^ names, where convenience demands it. And therefore in their own species, which they have most to do with, and wherein they have often occasion to mention par- ticular persons, they make use of proper names ; and there distinct individuals have distinct denominations. 5. Besides persons, countries also, cities, rivers, mountains, and other the like distinctions of place have usually found peculiar names, and that for the same reason ; they being such as men have often an occasion to mark particularly, and, as it were, set before others in their discourses with them. And I doubt not but, if we had reason to mention particular horses as often as we have to mention particular men, we should have proper names for the one, as familiar as for the other, and Bucephalus would be a word as much in use as Alexander. And therefore we see that, amongst jockeys, horses have their proper names to be known and distinguished by, as commonly as their servants : because, amongst them, there is often occasion to mention this or that particular horse when he is out of sight. How 6. The next thing to be considered is, — How general words Words are Come to be made. For, since all things that exist are only made. particulars *, how come we by general terms ; or where find we those general natures they are supposed to stand for*? Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas : and ideas * become general, by separating from them ' 'these,' i.e. in general names. ^ ' appropriated,' i. e. proper names. ^ The unreality of universals, and the reality of individual substances only, is one of Locke's reiterated assumptions. In this and in the sixth chapter, we have some of his chief statementsabout' abstract ideas.' (See also Bk. II. ch. xi. §§ 10, ii ; Bk. IV. ch. vii. § 9. ' By so-called Realists, who hold to the substantial reality of universal natures, existing either ante res or in rebus ; not, as Locke held, only in the ideas of individual men, i. e. post res. ° All ideas, according to Locke, are particular : knowledge is perception, of relations among particular ideas ; generality or universality being acci- dental to it— when the particular ideas happen in fact to represent more than one thing. Of General Terms. 17 the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that book hi. may determine them to this or that particular existence ^ ~**~ By this way of abstraction they are made capable of re- presenting more individuals than one ; each of which having in it a conformity to that abstract idea ^, is (as we call it) of that sort. 7. But, to deduce this a little more distinctly, it will not Shown by ■ perhaps be amiss to trace our notions and names from their *ee^krge beginning, and observe by what degrees we proceed, and by our com- what steps we enlarge our ideas from our first infancy. There from ' is nothing more evident, than that the ideas of the persons infancy- children converse with (to instance in them alone) are, like the persons themselves, only particular ^. The ideas of the nurse and the mother are well framed in their minds ; and, like pictures of them there, represent only those individuals. The names they first gave to them are confined to these individuals ; and the names of nurse and ■mamma, the child uses, determine themselves to those persons. Afterwards, when time and a larger acquaintance have made them observe that there are a great many other things in the world, that in some common agreements of shape, and several other qualities, resemble their father and mother, and those persons they have been used to, they frame an idea, which they find those many particulars do partake in ; and to that they give, with others, the name matt, for example. And thus they come to have ' In annexing words to abstract accepts under another name, after ideas or notions, intelligence tran- clearly demonstrating that they cannot scends sense andsensuous imagination, be formed in the sensuous imagination, which is hmited to what is concrete (See Principles of Human Knowledge, or particular, presented or represented Introd. § i6.) Locke calls all 'general' as placed and dated. Man's power to ideas (' concepts ') abstract, because do this is one of the most obtrusive they all presuppose abstraction, or illustrations of the fact, that sense is withdrawal of attention, from the inadequate to intellect, — the merely qualities in which things differ, in animal to the spiritual. order to concentrate attention upon ^ What Locke calls an ' abstract those in which they agree, and which idea ' is called by some logicians a constitute the concept. Abstraction concept, in contrast to a concrete is one of the functions of Locke's ' dis- image. The limitation of the term cerning faculty.' Cf. Bk. II. ch. xi. idea to what is imaginable, is at the §§ 9, 10. root of Berkeley's rejection of Locke's ' They are complex ideas of this or 'abstract ideas'; which, however, he that particular substance. VOL. II. C Chap. III. And further enlarge our coni' in them. 1 8 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. a general name, and a general idea. Wherein tiiey make notliing new ; but only leave out of the complex idea they had of Peter and James, Mary and Jane, that which is peculiar to each, and retain only what is common to them all ^. 8. By the same way that they come by the general name and idea of man, they easily advance to more general names and notions. For, observing that several things that differ by^stiii'^^^' from their idea of man, and cannot therefore be comprehended leaving out under that name, have yet certain qualities wherein they properties . , , . . , , ... - . . contained agree With man, by retammg only those quahties, and unitmg them into one idea, they have again another and more general idea ; to which having given a name they make a term of a more comprehensive extension ^ : which new idea is made, not by any new addition, but only as before, by leaving out the shape, and some other properties signified by the name man, and retaining only a body, with life, sense, and spon- taneous motion, comprehended under the name animal ^. 9. That this is the way whereby men first formed general ideas, and general names to them, I think is so evident, that nothing there needs no other proof of it but the considering of a man's stract and ^^^^' °'' Others, and the ordinary proceedings of their minds in partialj knowledge. And he that ^rnVs, general natures or notions zxt Ideas 01 , . . more anythmg else but such abstract and partial ideas of more complex complex ones, taken at first from particular existences, will, I fear, be at a loss where to find them. For let any one General natures are ' Condillac comments on this pas- sage, in his Essai sur VOrigine des Con- noissances Humaines, Section cin- quieme, in the spirit of his analysis of knowledge, even in its highest generality, into sensations transformees, and his interpretation of Locke in cor- respondence with this. ' Extension.' The extensive quan- tity of an abstract or general idea is measured by the number of less exten- sive ideas which can enter into it, in contrast to its (so-called, but not 'by Locke) comprehensive quantity, which is measured by the number of attri- butes it contains, forming the connota- tion of its name. This now familiar logical antithesis Locke may have taken from his favourite Port Royal Logic, Pt. I. ch. vi. ^ Our inability to imagine what we are able, in these processes, to have an abstract notion of, was afterwards shown conclusively by Berkeley, who did not thereby prove that we cannot form what Locke means by an abstract idea. He only proves that abstract ideas are not sensuous imaginations, and that our power of forming them implies possession of higher faculties than the one of sense. Of General Terms. 19 -effeetrand then tell me, wherein does his idea of man differ book hi. from that of Peter and Paul, or his idea of horse from that of """^ Bucephalus, but in the leaving out something that is peculiar to each individual, and retaining so much of those particular complex ideas of several particular existences as they are found to agree in^? Of the complex ideas signified by the names man and horse, leaving out but those particulars wherein they differ, and retaining only those wherein they agree, and of those making a new distinct complex idea, and giving the name animal to it, one has a more general term, that comprehends with man several other creatures. Leave out of the idea of animal, sense and spontaneous motion, and the remaining complex idea, made up of the remaining simple ones of body, life, and nourishment, becomes a more general one, under the more comprehensive term, vivens. And, not to dwell longer upon this particular, so evident in itself ; by the same way the mind proceeds to body, substance, and at last to being, thing, and such universal terms, which stand for any of our ideas whatsoever. To conclude : this whole mystery of genera and species, which make such a noise in the schools, and are with justice so little regarded out of them, is nothing else but abstract ideas, more or less comprehensive, with names annexed to them. In all which this is constant and unvariable, That every more general term stands for such an idea, and is but a part of any of those contained under it ^- 10. This may show us the reason why, in the defining of Why the words, which is nothing but declaring their signification, we ordinarily make use of the genus, or next general word that comprehends "J?.'^'= ^se it. Which is not out of necessity, but only to save the labour nitions. of enumerating the several simple ideas which the next general word ox genus stands for ; or, perhaps, sometimes the shame of not being able to do it. But though defining hy genus and ' Are all universals generalisations by tentative comparison of particulars? from ' particular existences ' ? Must ^ That is to say, the ' more general there not be ' abstract ideas ' that are term ' includes in its connotation only necessarily implied in our having an a part of the connotation of the terms experience that can be rationally in- of less denotation that are contained terpreted, and which are thus latent in under it, as species of which it is the the experience, not gradually formed genus. c a 20 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. differentia'^ (I crave leave to use these terms of art, thougl: ~'*~ originally Latin, since they most properly suit those notions Chap. III. ^^^^ ^^^ applied to), I say, though defining by the^^««jbe the shortest way, yet I think it may be doubted whether it be the best. This I am sure, it is not the only, and so not absolutely necessary. For, definition being nothing but making another' understand by words what idea the term defined stands for, a definition is best made by enumerating those simple ideas that are combined in the signification of the term defined ;, and if, instead of such an enumeration, men have accustomed themselves to use the next general tei'm, it has not been out of necessity, or for greater clearness, but for quickness and dispatch sake. For I think that, to one who desired to know what idea the word man stood for ; if it should be said, that man was a solid extended substance, having life, sense, spontaneous motion, and the faculty of reasoning, I doubt not but the meaning of the term man would be as well understood, and the idea it stands for be at least as clearly made known, as when it is defined to be a rational animal ; which, by the several definitions oi animal, vivens, and corpus, resolves itself into those enumerated ideas. I have, in ex- plaining the term man, followed here the ordinary definition of the schools ; which, though perhaps not the most exact, yet serves well enough to my present purpose. And one may, in this instance, see what gave occasion to the rule, that a definition must consist of genus and differentia ; and it suffices to show us the little necessity there is of such a rule, or advantage in the strict observing of it. For, definitions, as has been said, being only the explaining of one word by ' A definition, according to ordinary already defined gmus is substituted logical rule, should consist of the for the exhaustive analysis of its con- nearest genus and the loimst difference. notation in detail which would other- Its purpose is to present an exhaustive wise be required. But, as Locke im- analysis of the connotation of the term plies, languages are not always so dehned, on the assumption that Us made according to the rules of logic genus has been previously defined, and that the detailed analysis can be thus in hke manner the genus in the pre- dispensed with, and the name of the ceding definition, backwards to an genus substituted for it indefinable term, by which a stop is ^ Or the author of the definition put to the regress. On this assump- himself, tion, in order to save trouble, the Of General Terms. 21 several others, so that the meaning or idea it stands for may book hi. be certainly known ; languages are not always so made ~"*^ according to the rules of logic, that every term can have its signification exactly and clearly expressed by two others. Experience sufficiently satisfies us to the contrary ; or else those who have made this rule have done ill, that they have given us so few definitions conformable to it. But of defini- tions more in the next chapter. II. To return to general words : it is plain, by what has General been said, that general and universal belong not to the real ^ersal are existence of things ; but are the inventions and creatures of Creatures the understanding, made by it for its own use, and concern Under- only signs, whether words or ideas ^. Words are general, as standing, has been said, when used for signs of general ideas, and so belong not are applicable indifferently to many particular things ; and Existence ideas are general when they are set up as the representatives of things. of many particular things : but universality belongs not to things themselves, which are all of them particular in their existence ^, even those words and ideas which in their signi- fication are general. When therefore we quit particulars, the ' Locke often speaks not only of according as this or that is most im- words but of ideas as ' signs,' on the portant in reference to the matter we supposition that our knowledge of are engaged in. In navigation, for things is measured by our ideas of instance, the polarity of the magnet is them; also because ' the scene of ideas the essential quality, but to manu- which makes up one man's thoughts facturers the attracting power is the cannot be laid open to the immediate essential point.' (Whately.) But with view of another.' Cf. Bk. IV. ch. xxi. all this the existence of science and § 4. philosophy presupposes that some ^ Nature, that is to say, makes indi- generalisations of things are more vidual things alike in various respects natural — more rational — more nearly to other individual things, so that each accordant with the universal reason, thing may be placed in any one of according to which things exist, than wjOMy c/(MS«s, according to the resem- others thatmighthavebeenformedare. bling qualities which one arbitrarily Such species are the ideals to which selects. In this way species are ' in- science and philosophy approximate, ventions and creatures of the under- although the ideal is unattainable by standing.' Our modes of conceiving man. Even Locke's 'real essences' and classifying things are influenced, and J. S. Mill's ' natural classes ' recog- in each case, by the end we have in nise this. They presuppose a reality view. ' In different sciences and arts that exists in the (,by man) undiscover- different attributes are fixed on, as able ultimate constitution of particular essentially characterising each species, substances. Cf. § 13. 2 2 Essay concei-ning Human Understanding. BOOK III generals that rest are only creatures of our own making; — their general nature being nothing but the capacity they are Chap. III. p^,^ -^^^^^ ^.y the understanding, of signifying or representing many particulars. For the signification they have is nothing but a relation that, by the mind of man, is added to them i. Abstract li. The next thing therefore to be considered is, What Ideas j^jj^^ Qf sig-nification it is that general words have. For, as it are the ^ Essences is evident that they do not signify barely one particular thing; an?'^"'^™ for then they would not be general terms, but proper names, Species. a,o, on the Other side, it is as evident they do not signify a plurality ; for ma7i and men wo^ald then signify the same ; and the distinction of numbers (as the grammarians call them) would be superfluous and useless. '""That then which general words signify is a sort of things ^ ; and each of them does that, by being a sign of an abstract idea ^ in the mind ; to which idea, as things existing are found to agree, so they come to be ranked under that name, or, which is all one, be of that sort. Whereby it is evident that the essences of the sorts, or, if the Latin word pleases better, species of things, are nothing else but these abstract ideas. For the having the essence of any species, being that which makes anything to be of that species ; and the conformity to the idea to which the name is annexed being that which gives a right to that name ; the having the essence, and the having that conformity, must needs be the same thing : since to be of any species, and to have a right to the name of that species^ is all one, As, for example, to be a 7nan, or of the species man, and to ' To say, as Locke here does, that as far as qualities mean relations, ' only particulars are real,' logically Locke's minimum intelligibile is not means, according to Green, that only an isolated sense-feeling, of which the feeling of each moment is real ; that nothing can be predicated : it is the is, that the really existent is the un- individual substance, meaning, and that ^ny judgment about = A ' sort '—a lot, according to which it is impossible. While it is only by things are allotted to a class, being judged that it acquires generality, =■ ' An abstract idea '—unimaginable, so that all generality, according to the but containing a plurality of attri- Essay, must be ' fictitious,' and cannot butes, and so capable of being defined, be m thmgs. But, as we have seen, although it cannot be represented in the -particular' is, with Locke, an a mental image, which must be indi- mdivtdual substance manifested in its vidual or concrete. simple ideas, i. e. qualified, or related in Of General Terms. 23 have right to the name man, is the same thing. Again, to be book hi. a man, or of the species man, and have the essence of a ~**~ man, is the same thing. Now, since nothing can be a man, or "'^^" have a right to the name man, but what has a conformity to the abstract idea the name man stands for ^, nor anything be a man, or have a right to the species man, but what has the essence of that species ; it follows, that the abstract idea for which the name stands, and the essence of the species, is one and the same. From whence it is easy to observe, that the essences of the sorts of things, and, consequently, the sorting of things, is the workmanship of the understanding that abstracts and makes those general ideas. 13. I would not here be thought to forget, much less to They deny, that Nature, in the production of things, makes several \vorkman- of them alike : there is nothing more obvious, especially in ship of the races of animals, and all things propagated by seed ^. standing, But yet I think we may say, the sorting of them jmder names t'"t have is the workmanship of the tinderstanding, taking occasion, from Founda- the similitude it observes amottgst them, to make abstract g°^ii;"ud/ general ideas, and set them up in the mind, with names of Things. annexed to them, as patterns or forms, (for, in that sense, the word form has a very proper signification,) to which as par- ticular things existing are found to agreed so they come to be of that species, have that denomination, or are put into that ^ That is, has the attributes which III. ch. vi,' as evidence that he has not have been chosen by us to make the neglected to ' consider beings as God connotation of the name ' man.' But the had ordered them in their several sorts fact that the choice of the classifying and ranks.' attributes maybe more or less reason- ' This implies that the resemblances able— more truly scientific — shows according to which men bring things that there is an objective criterion; under classes correspond at least to and this criterion at last resolves itself something superficially presented to into what in Platonic language might observation by the things that are be called ' Ideas,' according to which classified, which is (so far) a real the universe changes its forms of ex- foundation for the classes formed, isting, in the experience of man, and ' Agreement,' as Green remarks, ' im- according to which also things exist plies some content in the things agree- in their natural kinds. ing' (p. 37), a consideration which ^ See Bk. III. ch. vi. ; also Third might have modified his interpretation Letter to Stillingfleet, p. 357, in which of the ' nominal and real essences ' of Locke refers to this passage, and to ' Bk. Locke. 24 Essay concerning Human Understanding. Chap. III. BOOK III. dassis. For when we say this is a man, that a horse ; this — justice, that cruelty ; this a watch, that a jack ; what do we else but rank things under different specific names, as agreeing to those abstract ideas, of which we have made those names the signs ? And what are the essences of those species set out and marked by names, but those abstract ideas in the mind; which are, as it were, the bonds between particular things that exist, and the names they are to be ranked under ? And when general names have any connexion with particular beings, these abstract ideas are the medium that unites them ; so that the essences of species, as distinguished and denomi- nated by us, neither are nor can be anything but those precise abstract ideas we have in our minds ^. And therefore the supposed real essences of substances, if different from our abstract ideas, cannot be the essences of the species we rank things into. For two species may be one, as rationally as two different essences be the essence of one species : and I demand what are the alterations [which] may, or may not be made in a horse or lead, without making either of them to be of another species? In determining the species of things by our abstract ideas, this is easy to resolve ^ : but if any one will regulate himself herein by supposed ^^a/ essences, he will, I suppose, be at a loss : and he will never be able to know when anything precisely ceases to be of the species, of a horse ox lead'^- 14. Nor will ahy one wonder that I say these essences, or abstract ideas (which are the measures of name, and the boundaries of species) are the workmanship of the under- standing, who considers that at least the complex ones are often, in several men, different collections of simple ideas; and therefore that is covetousness to one man, which is not so Each distinct abstract Idea is a distinct Essence. * That is, they are the deepest and truest modes of classifying things which ^nen can arrive at. ^ Because we have only to see that the individual things we apply the names ' horse ' or ' lead ' actually possess those qualities, however super- ficial the qualities may be, which we have resolved to make the connotation of those names. ' Inasmuch as the ' real essence ' is determined by the Divine or ultimate scheme of thought that is immanent in the universe, according to which the universe is viewed as it were from the centre, while our empirical generalisa- tions are all formed from side-views of things. Of General Terms. 25 to another ^. Nay, even in substances, where their abstract book in ideas seem to be taken from the things themselves, they are ~*^~ not constantly the same ; no, not in that species which is most familiar to us, and with which we have the most intimate acquaintance : it having been more than once doubted, whether the fcetus born of a woman were a man, even so far as that it hath been debated, whether it were or were not to be nourished and baptized : which could not be, if the abstract idea or essence to which the name man belonged were of nature's making ; and were not the uncertain and various collection of simple ideas ^, which the understanding put together, and then, abstracting it, affixed a name to it. So that, in truth, every distinct abstract idea is a distinct essence ; and the names that stand for such distinct ideas are the names of things essentially different. Thus a circle is as essentially different from an oval as a sheep from a goat ; and rain is as essentially different from snow as water from earth : that abstract idea which is the essence of one being impossible to be communicated to the other. And thus any two abstract ideas, that in any part vary one from another, with two distinct names annexed to them, constitute two distinct sorts, or, if you please, species, as essentially different as any two of the most remote or opposite in the world. 15. But since the essences of things are thought by some Several (and not without reason) to be wholly unknown, it may j/lns of not be amiss to consider the several significations of the word ^"^ '"°''<^ ° tssence. essence. ^ Cf. ch. xxii. § 6. sences of particular things existing do ^ That the human understanding has not depend on the ideas of men but on only imperfect insight into the ultimate the will of the Creator ; but their being ' natures ' of things proves, Locke ranked into sorts, under such and such argues, that the Realistic theory of names, does depend, and virholly de- universals cannot be worked out and pend, upon the ideas of men ' (i. e. applied by human faculties. The only upon the partial and superficial mani- ' universal characters ' that man can festations of themselves which things discover are those derived empirically make to the senses and understanding from his insufBcient observations of of men, and upon the manifestations things, and therefore post res. Cf. which men select for forming them First Letter to Stillingfleet, pp. 172- into classes.) First Letter to Stilling- 213. ' The real constitutions or as- fleet, pp. 212, 213 ; also p. 172. Essences. 26 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK in First, Essence may be taken for the very being of anything, ' — ■ whereby it is what it is^. And thus the real internal,^ but Chap. III. generally (in substances) unknown constitution of things, v*"^' = whereon their discoverable qualities depend, may be called their essence. This is the proper original signihcation ot the word, as is evident from the formation of it ; essentia, in its primary notation, signifying properly, being. And in this sense it is still used, when we speak of the essence of par- ticidar things, without giving them any name. Nominal Secondly, The learning and disputes of the schools having been much busied about genus and species, the word essena has almost lost its primary signification : and, instead of the real constitution of things, has been almost wholly applied to the artificial constitution of gemis and species ^. It is true, there is ordinarily supposed a real constitution of the sorts of things ; and it is past doubt there must be some real con- stitution^, on which any collection of simple ideas co-existing* must depend. But, it being evident that things are ranked under names into sorts or species, only as they agree to certain abstract ideas, to which we have annexed those ' The whainess of things was said to limited sphere of human observation, constitute their es5«!Cf or K<2tere(Arist. this content falls far short of that Met. iv. c. 4). It is that in them which ' essence ' by which things are what so makes them the real things they they are, according to their ultimate are, that, according to the universal constitution. Our deepest abstract system, the thing occupies its real ideas of things are far short of their place, or discharges its real function, ultimate reality, or rra/ essences, and which thus affords the philosophic ' Locke's conception of the (undis- answer to the question — What is it? coverable) real essence is that in ma- ' He knows what's what, and that's terial substances it is something/iAysKs/ as high, — texture of the primary particles, on As metaphysic wit can fly.' which their secondary qualities and It is that in things themselves which other powers depend, and from which, constitutes their true kind, though to if discovered, those qualities and discover this may transcend the range powers might be deduced a prim; of human faculty. It is Aristotle's and in man, that unknown natural 'substantial form' (efaos). constitution, on which his spiritual ' The term essence, thus confined to powers and character depend. This the superficial appearances that are physical conception of ' real essences' within the cognisance of man, has thus differs from the Aristotelian come to signify the contents of our hyperphysicaI/o^«. concepts of things ; fully cognizable by * ■ any collection of simple ideas those who have formed the concepts, coexisting,' i. c. any complex idea of a but being due to what is given in the particular sort of substance Of General Terms. 27 names, the essence of each genus, or sort, comes to be nothing book hi. but that abstract idea which the general, or sortal (if I may ""**"" have leave so to call it from sort, as I do general from genus,) name stands for. And this we shall find to be that which the word essence imports in its most familiar use. These two sorts of essences, I suppose, may not unfitly be termed, the one the real'^, the other nominaP essence. 16. Between the nominal essence and iKe.' name there is Constant so near a connexion, that the name of any sort of things between " cannot ^ be attributed to any particular being but v.'hat has the Name this essence, whereby it answers that abstract idea whereof nominal that name is the sign. Essence. 17. Concerning the real essences of corporeal substances Supposi- (to mention these only) there are, if I mistake not, two species^ opinions. The one is of those who, using the word essence are dis- for they know not what*, suppose a certain number of those /^y their essences, according to which all natural things are made,|"=''' . I Essences and wherein they do exactly every one of them partake^ useless. and so become of this or that species. The other and more rational opinion is of those who look on all natural things to have a real, but unknown, constitution of their in- sensible' parts; from which flow those sensible qualities which serve us to distinguish them one from another ^, according as we have occasion to rank them into sorts, under common ' ' real,' i. e. physically real essence stances, because composed of particles with Locke. of matter too small for our organs to ^ ' nominal,' called also the logical perceive, essence. ' ' insensible ' for our organs, but ' ' cannot,'- — unless the attributes not in themselves hyperphysical. which make the connotation of the ' Butalthough the ofow-i/erf qualities, termbywhichthis'essence'issignified according to which our classifications are found, by observation, to be actually are made, so depend on this (by us) un- possessed by the individual things to discoverable physical constitution (in which it is proposed to apply the each individual thing), that we cannot term. deduce the qualities we observe from * That is, for a supposed, but in- a knowledge of this constitution, that cognisable, hyperphysical or non-ma- defective knowledge of ours does not terial form, transcending sensuous disprove the supposition of the objective imagination, and which seemed to constitution itself. Given finer senses Locke a meaningless supposition ; un- and a more subtle intelligence, we might like his own physically real essence, then construct physical science a priori, concealed in individual material sub- and with demonstrable conclusions. 28 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. denominations. The former of these opinions, which sup- ■-^ poses these essences as a certain number of forms or moulds, *^"'"'- '"• wherein all natural things that exist are cast, and do equally partake, has, I imagine, very much perplexed the knowledge of natural things. The frequent productions of monsters, in all the species of animals, and of changelings, and other strange issues of human birth, carry with them difficulties, not possible to consist with this hypothesis ; since it is as impossible that two things partaking exactly of the same real essence should have different properties, as that two figures partaking of the same real essence of a circle should have different properties ^. But were there no other reason against it, yet the supposition of essences that cannot be known ; and the making of them, nevertheless, to be that which distinguishes the species of things, is so wholly useless and unserviceable to any part of our knowledge, that that alone were sufficient to make us lay it by, and content our- selves with such essences of the sorts or species of things as come within the reach of our knowledge : which, when seriously considered, will be found, as I have said, to be nothing else but, those abstract complex ideas to which we have annexed distinct general names. Real and 1 8. Essences being thus distinguished into nominal and nominal j.g^j 2^ ^g ,^^y further observe, that, in the species of simple ' Locke's ' real essence ' belongs to created things, which might enable us ihe individual, Theimmaterial essence, to deduce all their attributes from those or substantial form, against which he real essences or natures, seems, says argues, was supposed to belong to the Reid, ' to be quite beyond the human species, as that in which all the indi- faculties. We know the essence of a viduals participate ; and a definite, triangle, and from that essence can if unknown, number of such species deduce its properties. [Here the real was supposed to exist, the universe essence is only the nominal essence being created according to them— after fully expressed in its definition.] It ' its kinds.' is an universal, and might have been ^ What Locke calls ' nominal ' is conceived and reasoned about though more commonly called ' logical ' es- no individual triangle [with its real sence; in contrast to the 'real 'essence, essence that is not the nominal one] or (by us) incognisable (physical ?) con- had ever actually existed. But every stitution of individuals which makes individual thing that exists actually them the sorts of things they are, in has a real essence, which is above our the ultimate ideal of the universe. A comprehension ; and therefore we knowledge of the real essences of cannot deduce its properties or attri- Of General Terms. 29 ideas and modes, they are always the same ; but in sub- book hi. stances always quite different. Thus, a figure including a ~^*~ space between three lines, is the real as well as nominal ,, ■^ . ' the same essence of a triangle ; it being not only the abstract idea to in simple which the general name is annexed, but the very essentia Modes'^"'^ or being of the thing itself; that foundation from which different all its properties flow, and to which they are all inseparably stances. annexed. But it is far otherwise concerning that parcel of matter which makes the ring on my finger ; wherein these two essences are apparently different. For, it is the real constitution of its insensible parts \ on which depend all those properties of colour, weight, fusibility, fixedness ^, &c., which are to be found in it^; which constitution we know not, and so, having no particular idea of, having no name that is the sign of it. But yet it is its colour, weight, fusi- bility, fixedness, &c., which makes it to be gold, or gives it a right to that name, which is therefore its nominal essence. Since nothing can be called gold but what has a conformity of qualities to that abstract complex idea to which that name is annexed. But this distinction of essences, belonging par- ticularly to substances, we shall, when we come to consider their names, have an occasion to treat of more fully *. 19. That such abstract ideas, with names to them, as we Essences have been speaking of are essences, may further appear by abfe"nd what we are told concerning essences, viz. that they are incorrupt- all ingenerable and incorruptible °. Which cannot be true butes from its nature, as we do in essence, which Locke recognises and the triangle. We must take a con- accepts, while insisting that it is un- trary road [to that of a priori deduction discoverable by man. from real essences] in the knowledge of ^'fixedness.' See Boyle's Works, God's works, and satisfy ourselves vol. i. pp. 454, 634 ; iii. p. 78. with their attributes as [observed] '^ That is, which are observable by facts, and with the general conviction us— unlike the physical essence, which that there is a subject [substance with escapes our rude senses, its real essence] to which these attri- * In ch. vi. butes belong' [by which the substance = The Peripatetics held that form or is only inadequately manifested tons]. essence cannot be generated, or re- See Hamilton's Reid, p. 392 ; also garded as an effect, and that it must be p. 404. This of Reid is not inconsistent combined with matter. (Arist. Met. with Locke. Bk. VL) ' The physically, or chemically, real 30 Essay concerning Human Understanding- BOOK III. of the real constitutions of things \ which begin and perish -**- with them. All things that exist, besides their Author, are Chap. III. ^^j j.^j^j^ ^^ change ; especially those things we are acquainted with, and have ranked into bands under distinct names or ensigns. Thus, that which was grass to-day is to-morrow the flesh of a sheep ; and, within a few days after, becomes part of a man: in all which and the like changes, it is evident their real essence — i. e. that constitution whereon the properties of these several things depended— is destroyed, and perishes with them. But essences being taken for ideas established in the mind, with names annexed to them, they are supposed to remain steadily the same, whatever mutations the particular substances are liable to. For, whatever becomes of Alexander and Bucephalus, the ideas to which man and horse are annexed, are supposed nevertheless to remain the same ; and so the essences of those species are preserved whole and undestroyed, whatever changes happen to any or all of the individuals of those species. By this means the essence of a species rests safe and entire, without the existence of so much as one individual of that kind. For, were there now no circle existing anywhere in the world, (as perhaps that figure exists not anywhere exactly marked out ^,) yet the idea annexed to that name would not cease to be what it is ; nor cease to be as a pattern to determine which of the particular figures we meet with have or have not a right to the naine circle, and so to show which of them, by having that essence, was of that species. And though there neither were nor had been in nature such a beast as an unicorn, or such a fish as a mermaid; yet, sup- posing those names to stand for complex abstract ideas that contained no inconsistency in them, the essence of a mer- maid is as intelligible as that of a man ; and the idea of an unicorn as certain, steady, and permanent as that of a horse. ' The ' real essences ' which Locke dent of individuals, and thus remain presupposed would be created and true as long as the same name con- annihilated with the creation and dis- tinues to carry the same signiHcation. solution of the individual things which ^ Pure geometry, not perfectly real- they constituted. His ' nominal es- ised in our sensuous perceptions A sences, on the contrary, are indepen- things. Chap. III. Of General Terms. 31 From what has been said, it is evident, that the doctrine of book hi. the immutability of essences proves them to be only abstract ideas ; and is founded on the relation established between them and certain sounds as signs of them ; and will always be true, as long as the same name can have the same sig- nification ^. 20. To conclude. This is that which in short I would Recapitu- say, viz. that all the great business of genera and species, and ^ '""" their essences, amounts to no more but this : — That men making abstract ideas, and settling them in their minds with names annexed to them, do thereby enable them- selves to consider things, and discourse of them, as it were in bundles, for the easier and readier improvement and com- munication of their knowledgCj which would advance but slowly were their words and thoughts confined only to particulars ^. ' Lotze's contrast between the scientific secrets of the physical uni- changeless world of abstract ideas, verse He hid. The inadequacy of all and the ever-changing world of real human ' abstract ideas ' to the actual things and events is in analogy with reality, is the lesson of this chapter, this section. See Logic, Bk. III. But the inadequate is not the contra- ch. 2. dictory ; and even our conceptions ^ Our concepts of individual things, may be real as far as they go ; and which are their 'nominal essences,' are gradually approaching adequacy, help our progress towards those un- so far as there is real progress in a attainable ' real essences ' which, as knowledge which, as finite, must ideals, are the springs of our Intel- always be charged with enigmas at lectual advance, but in which the the last. CHAPTER IV. OF THE NAMES OF SIMPLE IDEAS. BOOK III. I. Though all words, as I have shown, signify nothing immediately but the ideas in the mind of the speaker ; yet, upon a nearer survey, we shall find the names of simple ideas, mixed modes (under which I comprise relations too), and natural substances, have each of them something peculiar and different from the other. For example :— Chap. IV. Names of simple Ideas, Modes, and Sub- stances, have each something peculiar. First, Names of simple Ideas, and of Sub- stances intimate real Existence. Secondly, Names of simple Ideas and Modes signify always both real and nominal Essences. Thirdly, Names of 2. First, the names of simple ideas and substances, with the abstract ideas ^ in the mind which they immediately signify, intimate also some real existence, from which was derived their original pattern. But the names of mixed modes terminate in the idea that is in the mind, and lead not the thoughts any further ; as we shall see more at large in the following chapter ^. 3. Secondly, The names of simple ideas and modes signify always the real as well as nominal essence of their species, But the names of natural substances signify rarely, if ever, anything but barely the nominal essences of those species; as we shall show in the chapter that treats of the names of substances in' particular. , 4. Thirdly, The names of simple ideas are not capable of any definition ; the names of all complex ideas are. It has ' That \s, general ideas, or general- isations, which involve abstraction. ^ Our ' simple ideas,' or the pheno- mena actually presented by the things of sense, or in the operations of our own mind ; and our ^imperfect) ideas of particular substances, are thus the only ideas that are concerned with reality, as distinguished from arbitrary com- binations elaborated by the minds of men. Of the Names of Simple Ideas. 33 not, that I know, been yet observed by anybody what words BOOK in. are, and what are not, capable of being defined ^ ; the want ~*^~ whereof is (as I am apt to think) not seldom the occasion . ^,^' ^ . ^ ' simple of great wrangling and obscurity in men s discourses, whilst ideas some demand definitions of terms that cannot be defined ; definrwe and others think they ought not to rest satisfied in an explication made by a more general word, and its restriction, (or to speak in terms of art, by a genus and difference,) when, even after such definition, made according to rule, those who hear it have often no more a clear conception of the meaning of the word than they had before. This at least I think, that the showing what words are, and what are not, capable of definitions, and wherein consists a good definition, is not wholly besides our present purpose ; and perhaps will afford so much light to the nature of these signs and our ideas, as to deserve a more particular consideration. 5- I will not here trouble myself to prove that all terms are If all lot definable, from that progress in infinitum, which it will ^eie 'isibly lead us into, if we should allow that all names could definable, . . it would )e defined. For, if the terms of one definition were still to be a )e defined by another, where at last should we stop ^ ? But I ?''°'="=^^ J ^ i^ m in- ;hall, from the nature of our ideas, and the signification oifinitum. our words, show why some names can, and others cannot be defined ; and which they are. 6. I think it is agreed, that a definition is nothing else but What a the showing the meaning of one word by several other notj, ^ syno nymous . terms'^. The meaning of words being only -the ' The impossibility of defining all than by presenting a red or a white words, with a reason for this, is stated thing to his awakened sense of sight, in the Port Royal Logic, especially ' ' II faut necessairement s'arreter Part i.- ch. xii, which anticipates some a des termes primitifs qu'on ne de- of Locke's remarks. ' To say that finisse point ; et ce serait un aussi simple ideas are indefinable means,' grand ddfaut de vouloir trop definir, according to Green (p. 42), ' that que de ne pas assez definir.' {La nothing can be said of such ideas ' — Logique de Port JRoyal.) that they are meaningless till brought ' Verbal or nominal definition, which linto relations. Locke means that a Locke has here in view, is merely :man born blind cannot be made to explicative — an exhaustive exhibition :picture mentally a red or white colour, of the plurality of attributes which merely by naming it and defining the men have chosen to include in the name, nor indeed by any other way connotation of the term defined. By VOL. n. D BOOK III. Chap. IV. Simple Ideas, why un- definable. Instances : Scholastic definitions of Motion. 34 Essay concerning Human Understanding. ideas they are made to stand for by him that uses them, the meaning of any term is then showed, or the word is defined, when, by other words, the idea it is made the sign of, and annexed to, in the mind of the speaker, is as it were re- presented, or set before the view of another ; and thus its signification ascertained. This is the only use and end of definitions ; and therefore the only measure of what is, or is not a good definition. 7. This being premised, I say that the names of simple\ ideas, and those only, are incapable of being defined. The! reason whereof is this. That the several ^ terms of a definition, signifying several ideas, they can all together by no means represent an idea which has no composition at all : and there- fore a definition, which is properly nothing but the showing the meaning of one word by several others not signifying each the same thing, can in the names of simple ideas have no place ^. 8. The not observing this difference in our ideas, and their names, has produced that eminent trifling in the schools, which is so easy to be observed in the definitions they give us of some few of these simple ideas. For, as to the greatest part of them, even those masters of definitions were fain to leave them untouched, merely by the impossibility they found in it. What more exquisite jargon could the wit of man invent, than this definition : — ' The act of a being in power, as far forth as in power '^ ;' which would puzzle any rational man, spreading out those which entitle an 'abstract idea' to its name, the idea is defined, i. e. made perfectly clear and distinct, so that it can be absolutely distinguished from every other ab- stract idea. ^ ' several,' i. e. different. "^ There is nothing new in this state- ment, already made by Descartes and others. Simple ideas, as containing only a single attribute, of course, cannot be defined; because a definition presupposes a plurality of attributes. They may be exemplified, however, in a sensuous image. See also Port Royal Logic, Pt. I. ch. xiii, where reason is given why ' it is impossible to define all words.' ^ Arist. Metaph. xi. 9. This Aris- totelian definition of motion had been already discarded in the Port Royal Logic. ' Is not our natural idea of motion a hundred times clearer than that given through this definition; and who could ever learn from it any of the properties of motion ? ' (Pt. If. ch. xvi.) This is the modern spirit of reaction against definitions of tlie schools, expressed in abstract lan- guage, and professedly related to ulti- mate principles, and the universal scheme of things. The Aristotelian Of the Names of Simple Ideas. 35 to whom it was not already known by its famous absurdity, to book hi. guess what word it could ever be supposed to be the explica- ""^^ tion of. If Tully, asking a Dutchman what beweeginge'^ Chap. IV. was, should have received this explication in his own language, that it was ' actus Qntis in potentia quatenus in potentia ; ' I ask whether any one can imagine he could thereby have understood what the word beweeginge signi- fied, or have guessed what idea a Dutchman ordinarily had in his mind, and would signify to another, when he used that sound ? 9. Nor have the modern philosophers, who have endea- Modern voured to throw off the jargon of the schools, and speak ^^^-^^^^^ intelligibly, much better succeeded in defining simple ideas, whether by explaining their causes^, or any otherwise. The atomists ', who define motion to be ' a passage from one place to another,' what do they more than put one synonymous word for another ? For what is passage other than motion ? And if they were asked what passage was, how would they better define it than by motion ? For is it not at least as proper and significant to say. Passage is a motion from one place to another, as to say. Motion is a passage, &c. ? This is to tran slate , and n ot to jdefine, when we change two words of the same signification one for anotKefy which, wbenlDne is better understooSThajTthe other, may serve to discover what idea the unknown stands for ; but is very far from a definition, unless we will say every English word in the dictionary is the definition of the Latin word it answers, and that motion is definition turns upon the difference '' ' Simple ideas of sense ' are not between the actual {hipyfia) and the defined by stating physical occasions potential {Siva/iLs) in the nature of or conditions of their manifestations ; things. Locke condemns it, as if it pre- because the occasion bears no likeness tended to explicate the simple sensa- to the sensation occasioned. An ex- tion which motion occasions in us. plication of the physical causes of our This was foreign to its purpose, which having a sensation of colour could not was to exhibit motion as the actual- convey an image of the colour to one isaiion of what before existed only born blind. potentially. ' ' atomists ' — Democritus and the ' Beweeginge is the Dutch for move- Epicureans, also the Gassendists in ment (so German Bewegung). Locke's the seventeenth century, sought in in- residence in Holland, when he was divisible atoms and their motions for finishing the Essay, suggested this and the ultimate constituents of whatever similar local illustrations. exists. D a 36 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. a definition of mohis. Nor will ' the successive application of ""*" the parts of the superficies of one body to those of another',' ' which the Cartesians give us, prove a much better definition of motion, when well examined. Definitions ID. ' The act of perspicuous, as far forth as perspicuous,' is of Light, j^jjother Peripatetic definition of a simple idea ; which, though not more absurd than the former of motion, yet betrays its uselessness and insignificancy more plainly ; because expe- rience will easily convince any one that it cannot make the meaning of the word light (which it pretends to define) at all understood by a blind man ^, but the definition of motion appears not at first sight so useless, because it escapes this way of trial. For this simple idea, entering by the touch as well as sight ^, it is impossible to show an example of any one who has no other way to get the idea of motion, but barely by the definition of that name. Those who tell us that light is a great number of little globules, striking briskly on the bottom of the eye, speak more intelligibly than the Schools; but yet these words never so well understood would make the idea the word light stands for no more known to a man that understands it not before, than if one should tell him that light was nothing but a company of little tennis-balls, which fairies all day long struck with rackets against some men's foreheads, whilst they passed by others. For granting this explication of the thing to be true, yet the^ id^ ea o f the cause of light, if we had it never so exact, would iiojnor_e,giy£.i;s_tl;g/ idea of light itself, as it is such ajiarticular perception in us, than jthe idea of the figure and motion of a sharp piece pi steel would give us the idea of that pain which it is able to cause in us. For the cause of any sensation, and the sensation ' Cf. Descartes, PrajCT>.Pt. II. § 25 ; is latent the physical cause of the also Berkeley's C. P. B.,lVorks,vol. iv. sensation (simple idea) of light. Tlie P- 424- definition is not meant to make the ' This is Aristotle's definition of sensation of light imaginable by one light— ^ws U lartv r) tovtov evepyeta tov born blind, but only to express its Siatpavom 17 iiacl,avh {DeAnim. 11. iii), physical cause, regarded as an energy i.e. the essence or common nature and not as a potentiality only. It which enables things to transmit light might be understood by one who never — their diaphanous, or, as Locke has had the sensation, it, ' perspicuous ' constitution, in which = Cf. Bk. II. ch. v. Of the Names of Simple Ideas. 37 itself, in all the simple ideas of one sense, are two ideas ; and book hi. two ideas so different and distant one from another, that no ~*^ , 1 A 1 , ,- Chap. IV. two can be more so^. And therefore, should Des Cartes's globules strike never so long on the retina of a man who was blind by a gutta serena, he would thereby never have any idea of light, or anything approaching it, though he understood never so well what little globules were, and what striking on another body was. And therefore the Cartesians ^ very well distinguish between that light which is the cause of that sensation in us, and the idea which is produced in us by it, and is that which is properly light ^. II. Simple ideas, as has been shown, are only to be got by Simple those impressions objects themselves make on our minds, by '^hy^un. the proper inlets appointed to each sort. If they are not definable, received this way, all the words in the world, made use of to explained. explain or define any of their names, will never be able to produce in us the idea it stands for. For, words being sounds, can produce in us no other simple ideas than of those very sounds ; nor excite any in us^ but by that voluntary connexion which is known to be between them and those simple ideas which common use has made them the signs of. He that thinks otherwise, let him try if any words can give him the taste of a pine apple, and make him have the true idea of the relish of that celebrated delicious fruit *. So far as he is told it has a resemblance with any tastes whereof he has the ideas already in his memory, imprinted there by sensible ' The idea of a sensuous feeling is fault different from the absurdity which here contrasted with the idea (formed Locke alleges against them, after physiological research) of the ^ This and the preceding section are organic conditions on which the sen- among Locke's few express references suous feeling naturally depends ; al- to Descartes or to the Cartesians. Yet though we are not necessarily aware Stewart says that he does not recollect of the conditions in being conscious of that Locke has anywhere in his Essay the sensuous feeling. mentioned the name of either Hobbes, " The definitions referred to do not Gassendi, Bacon, Montaigne, or Des- pretend to be substitutes for an expe- cartes. rience of the sensation of light, in * So Hume — ' We cannot form to which alone we can receive an idea ourselves a just idea of the taste of a of the sensation. They only pretend pine apple, without having actually to determine its physical cause, and tasted it.' {Treatise, I. i. i.) their inadequacy in this respect is a 38 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. objects, not strangers to his palate, so far may he approach -**- that resemblance in his mind. But this is not giving us that Chap. IV. .^^.^ ^^ ^ definition, but exciting in us other simple ideas by their known names ; which will be still very different from the true taste of that fruit itself In light and colours, and all other simple ideas, it is the same thing : for the signification of sounds is not natural, but only imposed and arbitrary. And no definition of light or redness is more fitted or able to produce either of those ideas in us, than the j^2^«^ light or red, by itself. For, to hope to produce anidea.of Jight or^olour' by a sound, however formed, is to expect that sounds should be~viiible, or colours audible ; and to make the ears do the office of all the other senses. Which is all one as to say, that we might taste, smell, and see by the ears : a sort of philosophy worthy only of Sancho Panga, who had the faculty to see Dulcinea by hearsay ^. And therefore he that has not before received into his mind, by the proper inlet, the simple idea which any word stands for, can never come to know the signification of that word by any other words or sounds whatsoever, put together according to any rules of definition, The only way is, by applying to his senses the proper object; and so producing that idea in him, for which he has learned the name already. A studious blind man, who had mightily beat his head about visible objects, and made use of the explication of his books and friends, to understand those names of light and colours which often came in his way, bragged one day, That he now understood what scarlet signi- fied. Upon which, his friend demanding what scarlet was? The blind man answered. It was like the sound of a trumpet Just such an understanding of the name of any other simple idea will he have, who hopes to get it only from a definition, or other words made use of to explain it ^. 1 I.e. an idea of the sensation of the squire; 'for the fact is, her mes- light or colour, as distinguished from sage, and the sight of her too, were an idea of its ultimate physical cause, both by hearsay, and I can no more or ' real essence,' as Locke calls it. tell who the lady Dulcinea is than I 2 'How can that be?' cried Don can buffet the moon.' {Don Quixoti, Quixote ; ' didst thou not tell me that Second Part, Bk. I. ch. ix.) thou sawest her winnowing wheat 1 ' s Intelligible definitions always prfr ' Take no heed of that, sir,' replied suppose a relative experience, sea Of the Names of Simple Ideas. 39 1 2. The case is quite otherwise in complex ideas ; which, book hi. consisting of several simple ones, it is in the power of words, " ,. r , , • , , , , ■ . Chap. IV. standing for the several ideas that make that composition, to j^^ ' imprint complex ideas in the mind which were never there contrary before, and so make their names be understood ^ In such complex collections of ideas, passing under one name, definition, or the \^^^^' ^y instances teaching the signification of one word by several others, has of a Statue place, and may make us understand the names of things which ^^ ^^'"" never came within the reach of our senses^; and frame ideas suitable to those in other men's minds, when they use those names : provided that none of the terms of the definition stand for any such simple ideas, which he to whom the explication is made has never yet had in his thought. Thus the word statue may be explained to a blind man by other words, when picture cannot; his senses having given him the idea of figure^, but not of colours, which therefore words cannot excite in him. This gained the prize to the painter against the statuary : each of which contending for the excellency of his art, and the statuary bragging that his was to be preferred, because it reached further, and even those who had lost their eyes could yet perceive the excellency of it. The painter agreed to refer himself to the judgment of a blind man ; who being brought where there was a statue made by the one, and a picture drawn suous or spiritual. A simple idea, sation,'ratherthanthoseof'reflection,' either of sensation or reflection, must in his view. He says nothing about be realised in consciousness before the the overwhelming tendency of sira- name which signifies it can be under- pie ideas of reflection to separate from stood. Hence Locke sends men to their signs, and to become ambiguous, their senses, external and internal, if ' That is, of tangible figure, or figure they want to have ideas of this sort. as presented in the sense of touch. They can be got only by being actually Whether the idea of figure, thus given presented, being absolutely dependent by touch, could at once be identified upon their manifestation in a concrete with the idea of figure given by sight, experience. They are ' given ' to us, when a born-blind man is made to see, not formed by us. is the problem proposed by Molyneux ' There must, of course, in that to Locke (Bk. II. ch. ix. § 8), and case, have been an immediate presen- further developed by Berkeley, in his tation in sense of the 'several ideas' New Theory of Vision. See also Con- that make up that ' composition,' to dillac, Essai sur VOrigine des Con- make the definition intelligible. noissances Humaines— section sixi^me, ' In what he says of the ' names of on this problem, simple ideas,' Locke has those of sen- 40 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. by the other ; he was first led to the statue, in which he traced -^ with his hands all the lineaments of the face and body, and Chap. IV. ^j^j^ ^^^^^ admiration applauded the skill of the workman, But being led to the picture, and having his hands laid upon it, was told, that now he touched the head, and then the fore- head, eyes, nose, &c., as his hand moved over the parts of the picture on the cloth, without finding any the least distinction: whereupon he cried out, that certainly that must needs be a very admirable and divine piece of workmanship, which could represent to them all those parts, where he could neither feel nor perceive anything. Colours 13. He that should use the word rainbow to one who knew to the"^ ^ ^ those colours, but yet had never seen that phenomenon, born-blind, would, by enumerating the figure, largeness, position, and order of the colours, so well define that word that it might be per- fectly understood. But yet that definition, how exact and perfect soever, would never make a blind man understand it; because several of the simple ideas that make that complex one, being such as he never received by sensation and experi- ence, no words are able to excite them in his mind. Complex 14. Simple ideas, as has been shown, can only be got by definable experience from those objects which are proper to produce in only when us thosc perceptions. When, by this means, we have our ideas'or* minds stored with them, and know the names for them, then which ^ve are in a condition to define, and by definition to understand, they con- -^ sist have the names of complex ideas that are made up of them. But from fx- when any term stands for a simple idea that a man has never perience. yet had in his mind, it is impossible by any words to make known its meaning to him. When any term stands for an | idea a man is acquainted with, but is ignorant that that term is the sign of it, then another name of the same idea, which he has been accustomed to, may make him understand its mean- ing. But in no case whatsoever is any name of any simple idea capable of a definition. Fourthly, 15. Fourthly, But though the names of simple ideas have simpfe^ ° "°^ t'^^ h^lp °f definition to determine their signification, yet Ideas of that hinders not but that they are generally less doubtful and less doubt- ^ • 1. 1 r • fui mean- uncertam than those of mixed modes and substances ; because Of the Names of Simple Ideas. 41 they, standing only for one simple perception, men for the book hi. most part easily and perfectly agree in their signification ; and ~**~J„ there is little room for mistake and wrangling about their ■ ^^^^ meaning. He that knows once that whiteness is the name of those of that colour he has observed in snow or milk, will not be apt to modes misapply that word, as long as he retains that idea ; which »"d sub- when he has quite lost, he is not apt to mistake the meaning of it, but perceives he understands it not. There is neither a multiplicity of simple ideas to be put together, which makes the doubtfulness in the names of mixed modes ; nor a supposed, but an unknown, real essence, with properties depending there- on, the precise number whereof is also unknown, which makes the difficulty in the names of substances. But, on the contrary, in simple ideas the whole signification of the name is known at once, and consists not of parts, whereof more or less being put in, the idea may be varied, and so the signification of name be obscure, or uncertain ^- 16. Fifthly, This further may be observed concerning simple Simple ideas and their names, that they have but few ascents in lined f^^ ^ prcedicamentaW^, (as they call it,) from the lowest species to the Ascents <» summum genus. The reason whereof is, that the lowest species dkamen- being but one simple idea, nothing can be left out of it, that *'^^'- so the difference being taken away, it may agree with some other thing in one idea common to them both ; which, having one name, is the genus of the other two i v.g. there is nothing that can be left out of the idea of white and red to make them agree in one common appearance, and so have one general name ; as rationality being left out of the complex idea of man, makes it agree with brute in the more general idea and name of animal. And therefore when, to avoid unpleasant enumerations, men would comprehend both white and red, and several other such simple ideas, under one general name, ' As remarked in a former note, sorts of words liable to ambiguity, cf. this applies to 'simple ideas of sense,' Novum Organum, I. aph. 59, 60. but not equally to ' simple ideas of re- ^ ' The predicamental line,' i. c. flection.' The meaning oi perception formed by the intermediate genera and or volition is more uncertain than the species which connect a lowest species meaning of white or hard. On the with its highest genus. 42 Essay concerning Hmnan Understanding. BOOK III. they have been fain to do it by a word which denotes only '"'*" the way they get into the mind. For when white, red, and "''^' '^' yellow are all comprehended under the genus or name colour, it signifies no more but such ideas as are produced in the mind only by the sight, and have entrance only through the eyes. And when they would frame yet a more general term to com- prehend both colours and sounds, and the like simple ideas, they do it by a word that signifies all such as come into the mind only by one sense. And so the general term gimlity, in its ordinary acceptation, comprehends colours, sounds, tastes, smells, and tangible qualities, with distinction from extension, number, motion, pleasure, and pain, which make impressions on the mind and introduce their ideas by more senses than one. Sixthly, Names of simple Ideas not arbitrary, but per- fectly taken from the existence of things. Simple modes. 17. Sixthly, The names of simple ideas, substances, and mixed modes have also this difference : that those of mixed modes stand for ideas perfectly arbitrary ; those of substances are not perfectly so, but refer to a pattern, though with some latitude ; and those of simple ideas are perfectly taken from the existence of things, and are not arbitrary at alP. Which, what difference it makes in the significations of their names, we shall see in the following chapters. The names oi simple modes difTer little from those of simple ideas ^. ' Regarded, that is to say, as sensa- tions, and without respect to their physical causes, '' ' Simple modes ' of simple ideas, in contrast to ' mixed modes,' are thus treated as phenomena of substances that are presented in the senses or in reflection, like the simple ideas of which they are the modes. But im- -mensity, eternity, RmA infinity (names of simple modes, according to Locke) are not so presented, and are surely more apt to be obscure and ambiguous than white or red. While, in Locke's view, our simple ideas and their simple modes are, in themselves and at first, particular and concrete, their names are for the most part general, and not proper names. Yellow, hot, soft, sweet, and other simple ideas, or qualities, of sensible things ; remem- bering, judging, believing, and other simple ideas of which we are conscious when we reflect, — are all individual phenomena in our living experience; but when we speak about them, the terms we use are general. CHAPTER V. OF THE NAMES OF MIXED MODES AND RELATIONS. I. The names of mixed modes'^, being general, they stand, as book hi. has been shewed, for sorts or species of things, each of which — **— has its peculiar essence. The essences of these species also, as ^^^' ' has been shewed^, are nothing but the abstract ideas in the modes mind, to which the name is annexed^. Thus far the names ^'^""^ '^°'' abstract and essences of mixed modes have nothing but what is common Ideas, as to them with other ideas : but if we take a little nearer survey °^^l^^\ of them, we shall find that they have something peculiar, which Names. perhaps may deserve our attention. 3. The first particularity I shall observe in them, is, that the First, The abstract ideas, or, if you please, the essences, of the several jdeaTthey species of mixed modes, are made by the under standing, whe.Yem stand, for they differ from those of simple ideas : in which sort the mind by the has no power to make any one, but only receives such as are Under- "■ J ' J standing. presented to it by the real existence of things operating upon it^. "3,. In the next place, these essences of the species of mixed Secondly, Made modes are not only made by the mind, but made very arbi- arbitrarily, ' Ch. xxii. Names of mixed modes essences, constituted by the connota- and of relations, abstracted by the tion annexed by men to the words understanding from particular sub- which stand for and sustain them in stances, are more apt to be of am- men's minds. biguous and uncertain meaning than ^ Cf. Bk. II. ch. ii. § 2; ix. § i. the names of the simple ideas that ' Simple ideas' are here spoken of as compose them. 'presented' — eitherby external things, " They are ' nominal ' and not ' real ' or by our own mind when we reflect. Chap. V. and without Patterns. 44 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK HI. trarily'^, made without patterns, or i-eference to any real existence. Wherein they differ from those of substances, which carry with them the supposition of some real being, from which they are taken, and to which they are conformable. But, in its complex ideas of mixed modes, the mind takes a liberty not to follow the existence of things exactly. It unites and retains certain collections, as so many distinct specific ideas ; whilst others, that as often occur in nature, and are as plainly suggested by outward things, pass neglected, without particular names or specifications. Nor does the mind, in these of mixed modes, as in the complex idea of substances, examine them by the real existence of things ; or verify them by patterns containing such peculiar compositions in nature. To know whether his idea of adidtery or incest be right, will a man seek it anywhere amongst things existing.' Or is it true because any one has been witness to such an action? No: but it suffices here, that men have put together such a collection into one complex idea, that makes the archetype and specific idea^; whether ever any such action were committed in rerum naturd or no. 4. To understand this right, we must consider wherein this making of these complex ideas consists ; and that is not in the making any new idea, but putting together those which the mind had before. Wherein the mind does these three things : First, It chooses a certain number ; Secondly, It gives them connexion, and makes them into one idea; Thirdly, It ties them together by a name. If we examine how the mind proceeds in these, and what liberty it takes in them, we shall easily obsei-ve how these essences of the species of mixed modes are the workmanship of the mind; How this is done. ' The arbitrariness in the constitu- tion of mixed modes, on which Locke insists so much, is not independent of considerations of utility; and thus the mixed modes required, for purposes of convenience, in one age or country, differ from those which men are led, for like purposes, to form in other times and places. Cf Bk. II. ch. xxii. §§ 5-8. Moreover, mixed modes, like all other complex ideas, cannot consist of contra- dictory attributes. The ' arbitrariness' is therefore limited by the formal laws of thought, as well as by convenience; and in some cases, as already noted, by the ultimate constitution of reason. ^ Which ' idea ' is the test for deter- mining to what ' real existences ' (if any) the name may be applied. Names of Mixed Modes and Relations. 45 and, consequently, that the species themselves are of men's book in. making. —"*— '^. Nobody can doubt but that these ideas of mixed modes ^ . , ' , ' '-' ^ Evidently are made by a voluntary collection of ideas, put together in arbitrary, the mind, independent from any original patterns in nature, the"ldea who will but reflect that this sort of complex ideas may be is often made, abstracted, and have names given them, and so a species Existence. be constituted, before any one individual of that species ever existed. Who can doubt but the ideas of sacrilege or adultery might be framed in the minds of men, and have names given them, and so these species of mixed modes be constituted, before either of them was ever committed ; and might be as well discoursed of and reasoned about, and as certain truths discovered of them\ whilst yet they had no being but in the understanding, as well as now, that they have but too fre- quently a real existence ? Whereby it is plain how much the sorts of mixed modes are the creatures of the understanding, where they have a being as subservient to all the ends of real truth and knowledge, as when they really exist ^. And we cannot doubt but law-makers have often made laws about species of actions which were only the creatures of their own understandings ; beings that had no other existence but in their own minds. And I think nobody can deny but that the resicrrection was a species of mixed modes in the mind, before it really existed^. 6. To see how arbitrarily these essences of mixed modes Instances: are made by the mind, we need but take a view of almost any jjjcest of them. A little looking into them will satisfy us, that it is Stabbing. the mind that combines several scattered independent ideas into one complex one ; and, by the common name it gives them, makes them the essence of a certain species, without regulating itself by any connexion they have in nature*. For ^ Accordingly Locke holds that ab- standing and empirical facts — between stract ' morality ' is a pure science, contingent data and the notions that which may be developed by demon- must be embodied in the data, stratlon, like pure mathematics, in a ^ That is, before any one had actually series of what he seems to regard as risen from the dead, analytical judgments. * Connexions of convenience, he " This suggests a consideration of means to say, not scientific relations, the connexion between the relations in- determine the mixed modes which volved in abstract notions of the under- men choose to make. 46 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. what greater connexion in nature has the idea of a man than ~^ the idea of a sheep with killing, that this is made a particular ^"'''"' ^' species of action, signified by the word murder, and the other not? Or what union is there in nature between the idea of the relation of a father with killing than that of a son or neighbour, that those are combined into one complex idea, and thereby made the essence of the distinct species parri- cide, whilst the other makes no distinct species at all ? But, though they have made killing a man's father or mother a distinct species from killing his son or daughter, yet, in some other cases, son and daughter are taken in too, as well as father and mother : and they are all equally comprehended in the same species, as in that of incest. Thus the mind in mixed modes arbitrarily unites into complex ideas such as it finds convenient ; whilst others that have altogether as much union in nature are left loose, and never combined into one idea, because they have no need of one name. It is evident then that the mind, by its free choice, gives a connexion to a certain number of ideas, which in nature have no more union with one another than others that it leaves out : why else is the part of the weapon the beginning of the wound is made with taken notice of, to make the distinct species called stabbing, and the figure and matter of the weapon left out? I do not say this is done without reason^, as we shall see more by and by ; but this I say, that it is done by the free choice of the mind, pursuing its own ends ; and that, therefore, these species of mixed modes are the workmanship of the under- standing. And there is nothing more evident than that, for the most part, in the framing these ideas, the mind searches not its patterns in nature, nor refers the ideas it makes to the real existence of things, but puts such together as may best serve its own purposes, without tying itself to a precise imita- tion of anything that really exists. But still 7. But, though these complex ideas or essences of mixed vient to modes depend on the mind, and are made by it with great the End of liberty, yet they are not made at random, and iumbled Language, . , ' ■' and not together Without any reason at all. Though these complex made at random. ' Therefore it cannot in all cases be entirely capricious. Cf. § 7. Names of Mixed Modes and Relations. 47 ideas be not always copied from nature, yet they are always book hi. suited to the end for which abstract ideas are made: and ~**~ though they be combinations made of ideas that are loose enough, and have as little union in themselves as several other to which the mind never gives a connexion that combines them into one idea ; yet they are always made for tlae- con- venience of communication, which is the chief end of language^. The use of language is, by short sounds, to signify with ease and dispatch -general conceptions ; wherein not only abundance of particulars may be contained ^ but also a great variety of independent ideas collected into one complex one. In the making therefore of the species of mixed modes, men have had regard only to such combinations as they had occasion to mention one to another. Those they have combined into distinct complex ideas, and given names to ; whilst others, that in nature have as near a union, are left loose and un- regarded. For, to go no further than human actions them- selves, if they would make distinct abstract ideas of all the varieties which might be observed in them, the number must be infinite, and the memory confounded with the plenty, as well as overcharged to little purpose. It suffices that men make and name so many complex ideas of these mixed modes as they find they have occasion to have names for, in the ordinary occurrence of their affairs. If they join to the idea of killing the idea of father or mother, and so make -a distinct species from killing a man's son or neighbour, it is because of the different heinousness of the crime, and the distinct punishment is due to the murdering a man's father ; and mother, different to what ought to be inflicted on ; the murder of a son or neighbour ; and therefore they find , it necessary to mention it by a distinct name, which is the I end of making that distinct combination. But though the ideas of mother and daughter are so differently treated, in , reference to the idea of killing, that the one is joined with ^:it to make a distinct abstract idea with a name, and so ^ Cf. § 10, in which it appears that ideas from dissolution in the mind that language exists not merely for con- has formed or received them, veying ideas from one mind into ^ Cf. ch. iii. § 2. another, but also for saving complex 48 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. a distinct species, and the other not ; yet, in respect of carnal -**- knowledge, they are both taken in under iticest : and that Chap. V. ^^jjj f^^. ^.j^^ ^^^^ convenience of expressing under one name, and reckoning of one species, such unclean mixtures as have a peculiar turpitude beyond others ; and this to avoid circum- locutions and tedious descriptions. Whereof §_ ^ moderate skill in different languages will easily satisfy theintrans- ,, ,.,..,. ,. ., latabie One of the truth of this, it being so obvious to observe great Words of g^Qj.g Qf -^vords in one language which have not any that divers . Languages answer them in another. Which plainly shows that those of Proof. 011^ country, by their customs and manner of life, have found occasion to make several complex ideas, and given names to them, which others never collected into specific ideas. This could not have happened if these species were the steady workmanship of nature, and not collections made and ab- stracted by the mind, in order to naming, and for the convenience of communication. The terms of our law, which are not empty sounds, will hardly find words that answer them in the Spanish or Italian, no scanty languages ; much less, I think, could any one translate them into the Caribbee or Westoe tongues: and the versura^ of the Romans, or corban'^ of the Jews, have no words in other languages to answer them ; the reason whereof is plain, from what has been said. Nay, if we look a little more nearly into this matter, and exactly compare different languages, we shall find that, though they have words which in translations and dictionaries are supposed to answer one another, yet there is scarce one often amongst the names of complex ideas, especially of mixed modes, that stands for the same precise idea which the word does that in dictionaries it is rendered by. There are no ideas more common and less compounded than the measures of time, extension, and weight ; and the Latin names, hora, pes, libra, are without difficulty rendered by the English names, how., foot, and pound : but yet there is nothing more evident than that the ideas a Roman annexed to these Latin names, were ' Versura— payment by borrowing the custom, pecuHar to Jews, of re- — a 'mixed mode,' due to a Roman serving from common use what has custom. been consecrated. ^ A ' mixed mode,' occasioned by Names of Mixed Modes and Relations, 49 very far different from those which an Englishman expresses book hi, by those Enrfish ones^. And if either of these should make ^'~**~„ Chap. V. use of the measures that those of the other language designed by their names, he would be quite out in his account. These are too sensible proofs to be doubted ; and we shall find this much more so in the names of more abstract and compounded ideas, such as are the greatest part of those which make up moral discourses : whose names, when men come curiously to compare with those they are translated into, in other languages, they will find very few of them exactly to correspond in the whole extent of their significations. 9. The reason why I take so particular notice of this is, that This we may not be mistaken about genera and species, and their spedes : essences'^, as if they were things regularly and constantly made '° '"^ 1 . • . • 11 made for : by nature, and had a real existence m thmgs ; when they Communi- : appear, upon a more wary survey, to be nothing else but an '^^t'°"- i artifice of the understanding, for the easier signifying such : collections of ideas as it should often have occasion to com- -municate by one general term ; under which divers particulars, J as far forth as they agreed to that abstract idea, might be :Comprehended. And if the doubtful signification of the word rspecies may make it sound harsh to some, that I say the species kof mixed modes are ' made by the understanding ' ; yet, I ,.think, it can by nobody be denied that it is the mind makes [;those abstract complex ideas to which specific names are given. ,j.And if it be true, as it is, that the mind makes the patterns for ^.sorting and naming of things, I leave it to be considered who ,j;makes the boundaries of the sort or species; since with me species and sort have no other difference than that of a Latin md English idiom. : 10. The near relation that there is between species, essences. In mixed ind their general name, at least in mixed modes, will further ^j^" ^ame^ ippear when we consider, that it is the name that seems to that ties .^reserve those essences, and give them their lasting duration, bination of .^or, the connexion between the loose parts of those complex simple i ' The mixed modes, so named in " This must be limited in its appli- ^,atin, differ in connotation from the cation to the essences of mixed modes, lixed modes for which the analogous and is not equally applicable to the. English terms stand. genera and species of substances. VOL. II. E 50 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. ideas being made by the mind, this union, which has no par- -**- ticular foundation in nature, would cease again, were there not idlarto^ something that did, as it were, hold it together, and keep thel gelhlr,°' parts from scattering. Though therefore it be the mind that' and makes n,akes the collection, it is the name which is as it were the Species, knot that ties them fast together ^ What a vast variety of different ideas does the word triumphus hold together, and deliver to us as one species ! Had this name been never made, or quite lost, we might, no doubt, have had descriptions of what passed in that solemnity : but yet, I think, that which holds those different parts together, in the unity of one complex idea, is that very word annexed to it ; without which the several parts of that would no more be thought to make one thing, than any other show, which having never been made but once, had never been united into one complex idea, under one denomination. How much, therefore, in mixed modes, the unity necessary to any essence depends on the mind ; and how much the continuation and fixing of that unity depends on the name in common use annexed to it, I leave to be considered by those who look upon essences and species as real established things in nature. II. Suitable to this, we find that men speaking of mixed modes, seldom imagine or take any other for species of them, but such as are set out by name : because they, being of man's making only, in order to naming, no such species are taken notice of, or supposed to be, unless a name be joined to it, as the sign of man's having combined into one idea several loose ones ; and by that name giving a lasting union to the parts which would otherwise cease to have any, as soon as the mind laid by that abstract idea, and ceased actually to think on it ' ' The concept, formed by an ab- all the perfections and imperfections straction of the resembling from the of the other; but without language non-resembling qualities of objects, there could be no knowledge realised would fall back into the confusion and of the essential properties of things infinitude from which it has been called and of the connexion of their acci' forth, were it not rendered permanent dental states.' (Sir W. Hamilton, for consciousness by being fixed and Logic, vol. i. p. 137.) But we are ratified in a verbal sign. Considered not therefore to identify words and in general, thought and language are thoughts ; for without ideas words are reciprocally dependent ; each bears empty sounds. Names of Mixed Modes and Relations. 51 But when a name is once annexed to it, wherein the parts of book in. that complex idea have a settled and permanent union, then is ~**~ the essence, as it were, established, and the species looked on as complete. For to what purpose should the memory charge itself with such compositions, unless it were by abstraction to make them general? And to what purpose make them general, unless it were that they might have general names for the convenience of discourse and communication ? Thus we see, that killing a man with a sword or a hatchet are looked on as no distinct species of action ; but if the point of the sword first enter the body, it passes for a distinct species, where it has a distinct name, as in England, in whose language it is called stabbing : but in another country, where it has not happened to be specified under a peculiar name, it passes not for a distinct species. But in the species of corporeal substances^, though it be the mind that makes the nominal essence, yet, since those ideas which are combined in it are supposed to have an union in nature whether the mind joins them or not, therefore those are looked on as distinct species, without any operation of the mind, either abstracting, or giving a name to that complex idea. 12. Conformable also to what has been said concerning the For the essences of the species of mixed modes, that they are the q "^"^ ^ creatures of the understanding rather than the works of nature; mixed Modes conformable, I say, to this, we find that their names lead our ^e look thoughts to the mind, and no further. When we speak of ^j^^^^"^'^^'" justice, or gratitude, we frame to ourselves no imagination Mind; of anything existing^ which we would conceive; but our^J^^^^" thoughts terminate in the abstract ideas of those virtues, and them to 1 r 7 be the look not further ; as they do when we speak 01 a korse, or workman- iron, whose specific ideas we consider not as barely in the ^^^P^nder- mind, but as in things themselves, which afford the original standing. patterns of those ideas. But in mixed modes, at least the most considerable parts of them, which are moral beings, we consider the original patterns as being in the mind, and to those we refer for the distinguishing of particular beings under ' As distinguished from the species contingent existence of the abstract of mixed modes. idea itself, in a mind that is conscious ' ' existing,' independently of the of it. E 2 BOOK III. Chap. V. Their being made by the Under- standing without Patterns, sliows the Reason why they are so com- pounded. Names of mixed Modes stand alway for their 52 Essay concerning Human Understanding. names. And hence I think it is that these essences of the species of mixed modes are by a more particular name called notions'^ ; as, by a peculiar right, appertaining to the under- standing. 13. Hence, likewise, we may learn why the complex ideas of mixed modes are commonly more compounded and de- compounded than those of natural substances. Because they being the workmanship of the understanding, pursuing only its own ends, and the conveniency of expressing in short those ideas it would make known to another, it does with great liberty unite often into one abstract idea things that, in their nature, have no coherence ; and so under one term bundle together a great variety of compounded and decompounded ideas. Thus the name of processio7i : what a great mixture of independent ideas of persons, habits, tapers, orders, motions, sounds, does it contain in that complex one, which the mind of man has arbitrarily put together, to express by that one name ? Whereas the complex ideas of the sorts of substances, are usually made up of only a small number of simple ones; and in the species of animals, these two, viz. shape and voice, commonly make the whole nominal essence. 14. Another thing we may observe from what has been said is, That the names of mixed modes always signify (when they have any determined signification) the real essences of their species. For, these abstract ideas being the workman- ' ' That notion will not stand for every immediate object of the mind in thinking, as idea does, I have, as I guess, somewhere given a reason in my book, by showing that the term notion is more peculiarly appropri- ated to a certain sort of those objects which I call mixed modes ; and I think it would not sound altogether so well to say the notion of red and the notion of a horse, as the idea of red and the idea of a horse. But if any one thinks it will, I contend not ; for I have no fondness for, no antipathy to, any par- ticular articulate sounds.' (Locke's Second Letter to Stillingfleet.) ' No- tions ' are thus distinguished from the presentations or ideas of sense (aiff^f l^ara), and from the concrete repre- sentations of the sensuous imagination {(payraai^aTa), — as products of elabora- tive intelligence {StavoTj/mTa or nf liara). ' Besides the sensations, or phantasms, the sensible ideas of cor- poreal things, passing impressed upon us from without, there must be also conceptions [concepts or notions] or intelligible ideas of them, actually exerted from the mind itself; or other- wise they could never be understood. (.Cudworth, Morality, p. 192.) Berkeley reserves ' notion,' as a term to desig- nate mind and its operations, and th? abstract relations of things. Names of Mixed Modes and Relations. 53 ship of the mind, and not referred to the real existence of book ill. things, there is no supposition of anything more signified by ~**~ that name, but barely that complex idea the mind itself has formed ; which is all it would have expressed by it ; and is Essences, that on which all the properties of the species depend, and J^g'^ort from which alone they all flow : and so in these the real and manship of nominal essence is the same ; which, of what concernment it is to the certain knowledge of general truth, we shall see hereafter '. 15. This also may show us the reason why for the most Why their part the names of mixed modes are got before the ideas they gre'usuaily stand for are perfectly known. Because there being no species got before of these ordinarily taken notice of but what have names, and ideas. those species, or rather their essences, being abstract complex ideas, made arbitrarily by the mind, it is convenient, if not necessary, to know the names, before one endeavour to frame these complex ideas : unless a man will fill his head with a company of abstract complex ideas, which, others having no names for, he has nothing to do with, but to lay by and forget again. I confess that, in the beginning of languages, it was necessary to have the idea before one gave it the name : and so it is still, where, making a new complex idea, one also, by giving it a new name, makes a new word'. But this concerns not languages made, which have generally pretty well provided for ideas which men have frequent occasion to have and communicate ; and in such, I ask whether it be not the ordinary method, that children learn the names of mixed modes before they have their ideas? What one of a thousand ever frames the abstract ideas oi glory and ambition, before he has heard the names of them? In simple ideas and sub- stances I grant it is otherwise ; which, being such ideas as have a real existence and union in nature, the ideas and names are got one before the other, as it happens. 16. What has been said here of mixed modes is, with very Reason little difference, applicable also to relations ; which, since every ^ein^so ' SeeBk.IV. ch.ii. §g; iv. §§5-10; vi. tical with, but presuppose ideas, which ' Inasmuch as words are not iden- make them significant. 54 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. man himself may observe, I may spare myself the pains to ~*^ enlarge on : especially, since what I have here said concerning \^Tl' Words in this third Book, will possibly be thought by some to t^r °" be much more than what so slight a subject required. I allow Subject, j^ might be brought into a narrower compass ; but I was willing to stay my reader on an argument' that appears to me new and a little out of the way, (I am sure it is one I thought not of when I began to write,) that, by searching it to the bottom, and turning it on every side, some part or other might meet with every one's thoughts, and give occasion to the most averse or negligent to reflect on a general mis- carriage, which, though of great consequence, is little taken notice of. When it is considered what a pudder^ is made about essences^ and how much all sorts of knowledge, discourse, and conversation are pestered and disordered by the careless and confused use and application of words, it will perhaps be thought worth while thoroughly to lay it open. And I shall be pardoned if I have dwelt long on an argument which I think, therefore, needs to be inculcated, because the faults men are usually guilty of in this kind, are not only the greatest hindrances of true knowledge, but are so well thought of as to pass for it. Men would often see what a small pit- tance of reason and truth, or possibly none at all, is mixed with those huffing^ opinions they are swelled with; if they would but look beyond fashionable sounds, and observe what ideas are or are not comprehended under those words with which they are so armed at all points, and with which they so con- fidently lay about them. I shall imagine I have done some service to truth, peace, and learning, if, by any enlargement ' The ' argument ' is chiefly intended modes — those concerned with morality toshowthatthe«ss«Mcesof mixedmodes for example. are not determined by the objective ^ ' pudder,' pother, or bother, i.e. ' natures ' of things, but by the will of to raise a dust, or cause confusion, man, influenced by motives of con- Cf. Conduct of Understanding, \ 13. venience and utility. It is not so new " 'huSing.' To Am/ is to swell or as Locke supposes. The argument in bluster. According to Home Tooke this chapter gives evidence of his dis- from hove, the past tense of hem- position to empirical conceptualism or not uncommon in the literature of the nominalism. It overlooks the rational seventeenth century, constitution of the ultimate mixed Names of Mixed Modes and Relations. 5 5 Chap. V. on this subject, I can make men reflect on their own use of bookiii. language ; and give them reason to suspect, that, since it is frequent for others, it may also be possible for them, to have sometimes very good and approved words in their mouths and writings, with very uncertain, little, or no signification. And- therefore it is not unreasonable for them to be wary herein themselves, and not to be unwilling to have them examined by others^. With this design, therefore, I shall go on with what I have further to say concerning this matter^. ^ To deliver men from the bondage of empty words, and the idola fori, was a chief motive with Locke in the pre- paration of the Essay, and in all his intellectual work. ' Names of simple ideas, along with those of their simple modes; and names of complex ideas of particular substances, are not ' arbitrary,' being determined by ' the existence of things.' On the other hand, names of mixed modes and abstract relations, dealt with in this chapter, compre- hending all our remaining ideas, are made (or left unmade) by individual minds, ' without reference to any real existence,' according to Locke, and thus depend wholly upon individual caprice or convenience. But if know- ledge and morality ultimately involve relations that are immutable and eternal, grounded in reason, as Locke seems also to allow, in what he says , for instance, about the relations of cause and effect (,Vol. I. p. 433, note), and of morality (p. 477, note), it follows that some ideas of relation are endowed with the character of intellectual ne- cessity, and are thus raised above individual caprice and mere conveni- ence. With Locke the vnixed modes of our simple ideas, and our ideas of relation, are abstracted from the simple ideas in which particular substances are presented in the senses and in reflection ; and thus, unlike simple ideas, in themselves and from the first involve generality, their names of coursebeingabstract and general terms. Thus government and obligation, and the relations of causality and morality, are abstractions from particular ideas, and universality belongs to the names. CHAPTER VI. OF THE NAMES OF SUBSTANCES. BOOK III. Chap. VI. The common Names of Sub- stances stand for Sorts. I. The common names of substances, as well as other general terms, stand for sorts : which is nothing else but the being made signs of such complex ideas wherein several particular substances do or might agree, by virtue of which they are capable of being comprehended in one common conception, and signified by one name^- I say do or might agree : for though there be but one sun existing in the world, yet the idea of it being abstracted, so that more substances (if there were several) might each agree in it, it is as much a sort as if there were as many suns as there are stars ^. They want not their reasons who think there are, and that each fixed star would answer the idea the name sun stands for, to one who was placed in a due distance : which, by the way, may show us how much^ the sorts, or, if you please, genera ' Cf. ch. iii. § II, according to which particular substances, and their simple ideas or qualities are the only real beings ; generality or universality being the elaboration of the human understanding, accidental to real beings. Our ideas of substances are thus originally of this, that, or the other concrete substance, dimly and im- perfectly presented in its simple ideas ; generality issues when we discover that it may represent other sub- stances that resemble it. The names of substances are for the most part general, but almost all the proper names in language are names of sub- stances, conceived as this or that individual substance. ^ 'Abstract ideas' may thus be potentially, not actually, general ; they do not depend upon the actual exis- tence of a plurality of individual things corresponding to them. ^ ' how much.' He does not deny that the ' sorts ' which men make may be founded on something in the nature of ' particular beings ' ; nor that gene- ralisations, made by man, may also be demanded by something in the consti- tution of the 'particular substances' of which the universe consists, and to which some modes of sorting and naming them more nearly correspond than others do. Names of our Ideas of Substances. 57 and species of things (for those Latin terms signify to me no book hi. more than the Enghsh word sort) depend on such collections ~"**~ of ideas as men have made, and not on the real nature of things; since it is not impossible but thatj in propriety of speech, that might be a sun to one ^ which is a star to another. 2. The measure and boundary of each sort or species, The whereby it is constituted that particular sort, and distinguished of each*^ from others, is that we call its essence, which is nothing but ^o""' °f • 1 9 1 • 1 1 • t ^ substance that abstract idea"' to which the name is annexed; so that is our everything contained in that idea is essential to that sort. ^^^''■^'^' This, though it be all the essence of natural substances that which the we know, or by which we distinguish them into sorts, yet I call "n™exed it by a peculiar name, the nominal essence, to distinguish it from the real constitution of substances, upon which depends this nominal essence, and all the properties of that sort; which, therefore, as has been said, may be called the real essence : v. g. the nominal essence of gold is that complex idea the word gold stands for, let it be, for instance, a body yellow, of a certain weight, malleable, fusible, and fixed. But the real essence is the constitution of the insensible parts of that body, on which those qualities and all the other properties of gold depend. How far these two are different, though they are both called essence, is obvious at iirst sight to discovert 3. For, though perhaps voluntary motion, with sense and The . . , , , ^ . , , , , nominal reason, joined to a body of a certain shape, be the complex a^d real idea to which I and others annex the name vian, and so be Essence different. the nominal essence of the species so called : yet nobody will say that complex idea is the real essence and source of all those operations which are to be found in any individual of that sort*. The foundation of all those qualities which are ' To one who has not conceived motions of their primary particles, that stars are really suns. in which he would have their ' real * Otherwise called ' concept ' or essence ' to consist— an essence phy- ' notion,' which makes the meaning sical, and not metaphysical as with of the general name. Aristotle. The ' real essence' of spmfe '' Cf. Bk. II. ch. viii, and the other is referred to in § 3. passages of the Essay, in which Locke ' Our generalisations, that is to say, treats of a supposed relation between are founded upon the superficially the secondary quaUties and powers manifested, and therefore incompletely of bodies and those collocations and revealed, constitution of the things 58 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. the ingredients of our complex idea, is something quite -*^ different : and had we such a knowledge of that constitution Chap. VI. ^j- ^^^^ ^^^^ which his faculties of moving, sensation, and reasoning, and other powers flow, and on which his so regular shape depends, as it is possible angels have, and it is certain his Maker has^, we should have a quite other idea of his essence than what now is contained in our definition of that species, be it what it will : and our idea of any individual man would be as far different from what it is now, as is his who knows all the springs and wheels and other contrivances within of the famous clock at Strasburg, from that which a gazing countryman has of it, who barely sees the motion of the hand, and hears the clock strike, and observes only some of the out- ward appearances^. Nothing 4. That essence, in the ordinary use of the word, relates to ^oTiidi- sorts, and that it is considered in particular beings no further viduals. than as they are ranked into sorts, appears from hence : that, take but away the abstract ideas by which we sort individuals, and rank them under common names, and then the thought of anything essential ^ to any of them instantly vanishes : we have no notion of the one without the other, which plainly shows their relation. It is necessary for me to be as I am ; God and nature has made me so : but there is nothing I have is essential to me. An accident or disease may very much alter my colour or shape ; a fever or fall may take away my reason or memory, or both ; and an apoplexy leave neither sense, nor under- standing, no, nor life. Other creatures of my shape may be classed. Hence the connotation of sciousness, unless its essence is to be their class-names does not represent found in the organic conditions on the deepest and truest conception of which it now depends in man. particular substances, as in the Divine ^ 'essential,' i.e. there is nothing of Ideas, but only so far as they are cog- which we have any idea that is es- nisable at our one-sided point of view. sential to the existence of a particular ' It is here implied that the ' real thing, except the simple ideas or essences,' incognisable at the side point qualities needed to entitle it to receive ofviewof a finite intelligence, are fully a name that has been charged by us known only at the Divine centre, or in with a certain connotation, which thus Platonic language in the Divine Ideas. forms its ' nominal ' essence, or the ^ The illustration found in this famed essence of the name we apply to it. astronomical clock may suit the real For meanings of the word essence, see essence of bodies, but not of self-con- ch. iii. § 15. Names of our Ideas of Substances. 59 made with more and better, or fewer and worse faculties than book hi. I have : and others may have reason and sense in a shape and ~**~ Chap VI. body very different from mine. None of these are essential to the one or the other, or to any individual whatever, till the mind refers it to some sort or species of things ^ ; and then presently, according to the abstract idea of that sort, some- thing is found essential. Let any one examine his own thoughts, and he will find that as soon as he supposes or speaks of essential, the consideration of some species, or the complex idea signified by some general name, comes into his mind ; and it is in reference to that that this or that quality is said to be essential. So that if it be asked, whether it be essential to me or any other particular corporeal being, to have reason ? I say, no ; no more than it is essential to this white thing I write on to have words in it. But if that particular being be to be counted of the sort man, and to have the name man given it, then reason is essential to it ; sup- posing reason to be a part of the complex idea the name man stands for : as it is essential to this thing I write on to contain words, if I will give it the name treatise, and rank it under that species^. So that essential and not essential relate only ' Hence ' proper names' are not, as which isthearchetype,apphedtothem. such, charged with any connotation, And as he afterwards says (Bk. IV. and not until the ' individual ' is brought ch. iv. § 5), all our knowledge, when under a class name do we regard any set confined to the meanings of abstract of qualities as nominally essential to if, words (analytical judgments), is ' in- i.e. conditions we have agreed to regard fall ibly certain ; because, in the concepts as indispensable to its being entitled and reasonings of which it consists,' to receive the name. It is only when we ' intend things no further than as an individual is regarded as a member they are conformable to our ideas,' of a class, that we can specify certain i. e. to the connotations we have an- of its attributes as 'essential,' i.e. nexed to the names applied to them, all those which we have chosen to If any other ' conformity ' is errone- include in the meaning of its common ously assumed, the ' particular things ' name. But this essentiality originates are irrelevant to the name ; just as an in us, and not in it. arithmetical calculation may be ab- ^ In 'nominal essences,' the >«^a«M^ stractly accurate, and yet misapplied. of the name is thus the criterion and In this sense he tells Molyneux (Aug. archetype ; and particular things are 23, 1693) that he ' finds upon examina- regarded only so far as they are tion that all general truths are eternal found to agree with this archetype verities ; though by mistake some men made by man, and thus to be entitled have selected some, as if they alone to have the names the connotation of were eternal verities.' 6o Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. Chap. VI. The only essences perceived by us in individual substances are those qualities which entitle them to receive their names. to our abstract ideas, and the names annexed to them ; which amounts to no more than this, That whatever particular thing has not in it those qualities which are contained in the abstract idea which any general term stands for, cannot be ranked under that species, nor be called by that name ; since that abstract idea is the very essence of that species ^. 5. Thus, if the idea of body with some people''' be bare extension or space, then solidity is not essential to body; if others make the idea to which they give the name body to be solidity and extension, then solidity is essential to body I That therefore, and that alone, is considered as essential, which makes a part of the complex idea the name of a sort stands for ; without which no particular thing can be reckoned of that sort, nor be entitled to that name. Should there be found a parcel of matter that had all the other qualities that are in iron, but wanted obedience to the loadstone, and would neither be drawn by it nor receive direction from it, would any one question whether it wanted anything essential? It would be absurd to ask, Whether a thing really existing wanted anything essential to it. Or could it be demanded, Whether this made an essential or specific difference or no, since ive have no other measure of essential or specific but our abstract ideas ? And to talk of specific differences in nature, without reference to general ideas in names, is to talk unintelligibly. For I would ask any one, What is sufficient to make an essential difference in nature between any two particular beings, without any regard had to some ' That common names are applicable to things only so far as the things possess the {superficial) attributes which we have arbitrarily chosen to connote by the names, and which are thus ' essential ' to their having the names, does not prove that there is no deeper and truer conception of them, in accordance with which their com- mon names might have received a different connotation, if only we could see things as God sees them. It does not even show that the notions which a human understanding of things is able to annex to its scientific and philosophic terms may not ap- proximate indefinitely towards that ideal, in the progress of man's know- ledge of the universe ; so that Locke's empirical conceptualism exaggerates the inevitable imperfection of finite concepts of particular substances. ^ Descartes and the Cartesians. ■^ But one of these conceptions of body is more accordant with the reason that is immanent in things than the other; and another, attainable by man, may be still more rational than either. Names of our Ideas of Substances. 6i abstract idea, which is looked upon as the essence and BOOK in. standard of a species^? All such patterns and standards ~**~^ being quite laid aside, particular beings, considered barely in themselves, will be found to have all their qualities equally essential ; and everything in each individual will be essential to it ; or, which is more, nothing at all ''•. For, though it may be reasonable to ask, Whether obeying the magnet be essen- tial to iron? yet I think it is very improper and insig- nificant to ask, whether it be essential to the particular parcel of matter I cut my pen with ; without considering it under the name iron, or as being of a certain species ^. And if, as has been said, our abstract ideas, which have names annexed to them, are the boundaries of species, nothing can be essential but what is contained in those ideas. 6. It is true, I have often mentioned a real essence, distinct Even in substances from those abstract ideas of them, which I call ggggn'^jfes their nominal essence. By this real essence I mean, that real ofindi- constitution of anything, which is the foundation of all those stances properties that are combined in, and are constantly found to ™P'y . co-exist with the nominal essence ; that particular constitu- sorts, tion which everything has within itself, without any relation to anything without it. But essence, even in this sense, relates to a sort, and supposes a species. For, being that real constitution on which the properties depend, it necessarily supposes a sort of things, properties belonging only to species, and not to individuals : v. g. supposing the nominal essence of gold to be a body of such a peculiar colour and weight, with malleability and fusibility, the real essence is that con- stitution of the parts of matter on which these qualities and ' May we not refer to the perfect hence too the correlative concepts ? idea of them, at the (by us unattain- Cf. Spinoza, SAjces, Pt. 11, xi. Schol. i, able) divine point of view, as an ideal in analogy with §§4, 5. 'standard,'from which human science, ^ Green, in commenting on this vahd it may be as far as it goes, neces- passage (Introduction, parag. 94, 95), sarily falls short, in respect of depth supposes that by a ' particular being ' and completeness ? Locke means the abstract individual '^ Are 'particular beings' ever' con- stripped of all qualities, not the par- sidered barely in themselves,' when ticular being, presenting to us only a they are considered and conceived at few of the qualities, and these on the all? May not some of their relations surface, as it were, for us to make our be deeper and truer than others, and abstract or general ideas of it. Chap. VI. 62 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK III. their union depend ; and is also the foundation of its solu- bility in aqtia regia and other properties, accompanying that complex idea 1. Here are essences and properties, but all upon supposition of a sort or general abstract idea, which is con- sidered as immutable ; but there is no individual parcel of matter to which any of these qualities are so annexed as to be essential to it or inseparable from it^. That which is essen- tial belongs to it as a condition whereby it is of this or that sort : but take away the consideration of its being ranked under the name of some abstract idea, and then there is nothing necessary to it, nothing inseparable from it. In- deed, as to the real essences of substances, we only suppose their being, without precisely knowing what they are ; but that which annexes them still to the species is the nominal essence, of which they are the supposed foundation and cause ^. ' The ' real essences,' even if brought within our reach, would still be species and not individuals— species formed of deeper and truer qualities of the things whose nominal essences they might still be — their ultimate constitu- tion, in short, i. e. the things as they appear in the divine ideas of them. The atomic ' texture ' of material sub- stances, however, is Locke's example of * real essence,' out of reach of human senses and understanding, but the source of those superficial and mutable phenomena that alone come within human observation. ■^ So that ' all general truths are eternal verities,' being in themselves abstract, or independent of all ' indi- vidual parcels of matter.' ^ The notninal essences of Locke are the meanings of terms : his real essences are the iiliimaie (physical) constitution of particular things. We may have a- demonstrably necessary knowledge of nominal essences and their rela- tions ; for the ' meanings ' are formed by, and therefore fully intelligible to, the mind that forms them ; but it is only a verbal knowledge that is thus demon- strated. The knowledge of the real essences of things, with all their impli- cates, is omniscience, and thus tran- scends human intelligence. Man's knowledge of the universe, uncon- sciously involved in the phenomena given by his senses and reflection, is intermediate between the notional science that alone is demonstrable, and the omniscience of Divine knowledge. Ours is the sphere of probable pre- sumption, by which human Ufe has to be determined, as it regulates all the judgments of man that are depen- dent on what the future may bring forth, and depends on the unknown forces which may modify the laws of things, as things can be known by us. To explain man's intellectual office and duty, in this his intermediate posi- tion — capable of something deeper and more real than a merely verbal science, yet incapable of knowledge of ' real essences ' — is, on a liberal interpreta- tion, the drift of the £5s«v— more apparent in its fourth Book, for which this, on ' nominal and real essences, prepares the way. It there leads tothe conclusion, that demonstrable science Names of our Ideas of Siibstances. 63 7. The next thing to be considered is, by which of those book hi. essences it is that substances are determined ^ into sorts or ~**~ species ; and that, it is evident, is by the nominal essence. _ For it is that alone that the name, which is the mark of the nominal sort, signifies. It is impossible, therefore, that anything should y^^^^l^ determine the sorts of things, which we rank under general 'he names, but that idea which that name is designed as a mark us. for ; which is that, as has been shown, which we call nominal essence. Why do we say this is a horse, and that a mule ; this is an animal, that an herb ? How comes any particular thing to be of this or that sort, but because it has that nominal essence ; or, which is all one, agrees to that abstract idea, that name is annexed to ? And I desire any one but to reflect on his own thoughts, when he hears or speaks any of those or other names of substances, to know what sort of essences they stand for. 8. And that the species of things to us are nothing but the The ranking them under distinct names, according to the complex ^f species, ideas in us, and not according to precise, distinct, real essences ^^ formed by us. in them^, is plain from hence: — That we find many of the individuals that are ranked into one sort, called by one common name, and so received as being of one species, have yet qualities, depending on their real constitutions, as far different one from another as from others from which they are accounted to differ specifically. This, as it is easy to be observed by all who have to do with natural bodies, so chemists especially are often, by sad experience, convinced of it, when they, sometimes in vain, seek for the same qualities in one parcel of sulphur, antimony, or vitriol, which they have found in others. For, though they are bodies of the same species, having the same nominal essence, under the of 'particular substances ' is unattain- related only to certain observable able by man, who cannot form univer- qualities in the substances, selected sally necessary propositions about for this purpose by the generalising finite things. Cf. Bk. IV. ch. xii. mind, and not to their real essences, §§ g, 10. of which we can have no ideas, ' ' determined,' i. c by men, with because they are unperceivable, either their limited faculties and experience. by our limited senses or in self-con- " Yet not, as in mixed modes, with- sciousness. out any relation at all to things ; but 64 Essay concerning Human Understanding. BOOK HI. same name, yet do they often, upon severe ways of examina- ~**~ tion, betray qualities so different one from another, as to Chap. VI. fj-^g^j-^^^g ^j^g expectation and labour of very wary chemists, But if things were distinguished into species, according to their real essences, it would be as impossible to find different properties in any two individual substances of the same species, as it is to find different properties in two circles, or two equilateral triangles. That is properly the essence to tis, which determines every particular to this or that classis\ or, which is the same thing, to this or that general name: and what can that be else, but that abstract idea to which that name is annexed ^ ; and so has, in truth, a reference, not so much to the being of particular things, as to their general denominations ? Not the 9. Nor indeed can we rank and sort things, and consequently ETsence (which is the end of sorting) denominate them, by their real or texture essenccs ; because we know them not. Our faculties carry us which we "^^ further towards the knowledge and distinction of sub- know stances, than a collection of those sensible ideas which we not. observe in them ; which, however made with the greatest diligence and exactness we are capable of, yet is more remote from the true internal constitution from which those qualities flow, than, as I said, a countryman's idea is from the inward contrivance of that famous clock at Strasburg, whereof he only sees the outward figure and motions. There is not so con- temptible a plant or animal, that does not confound the most enlarged understanding. Though the familiar use of things about us take off our wonder, yet it cures not our ignorance, When we come to examine the stones we tread on, or the iron we daily handle^ we presently find we know not their make ; and can give no reason of the different qualities we find in them. It is evident the internal constitution, whereon their properties depend ^ is unknown to us : for to go no ' That connotation, in other words, standing- are thus relative, superficial, which we have chosen to introduce into and arbitrary, not absolute; they depend the name, in virtue o