both by the frequent use of language, and by the structure of it. It is strengthened by the frequent use of language. Language is the sole channel through which we communicate our knowledge and discoveries to others, and through which the knowledge and discoveries of others are communicated to us. By reiterated recourse to this medium, it necessarily happens, that when things are related to each other, the words signifying those things are more commonly brought together in discourse. Hence the words and names themselves, by customary vicinity, contract in the fancy a relation additional to that which they derive purely from being the symbols of related things. Further, this tendency is strengthened by the structure of language. All languages whatever, even the most barbarous, as far as it hath yet appeared, are of a regular and analogical make. The consequence is, that similar relations in things will be expressed similarly; that is, by similar inflections, derivations, compositions, arrangement of words, or juxtaposition of particles, according to the genius or grammatical form of the particular tongue. Now, as by the habitual use of a language (even though it were quite irregular) the signs would insensibly become connected in the imagination, wherever the things signified are connected in nature; so, by the regular structure of a language, this connexion among the signs is conceived as analagous to that which subsisteth among their archetypes. From these principles we may be enabled both to understand the meaning, and to perceive the justness of what is affirmed in the end of the preceding quotation: "The custom which we have acquired of attri"buting certain relations to ideas, still follows the "words, and makes us immediately perceive the absur'dity of that proposition." Immediately, that is, even before we have leisure to give that attention to the signs which is necessary in order to form a just conception of the things signified. In confirmation of this doctrine it may be observed, that we really think by signs as well as speak by them.

I have hitherto, in conformity to what is now become

a general and inveterate custom, and in order to avoid tiresome circumlocutions, used the terms sign and idea as exactly correlative. This I am sensible, is not done with strict propriety. All words are signs, but that the signification cannot always be represented by an idea, will, I apprehend, be abundantly evident from the observations following. All the truths which constitute science, which give exercise to reason, and are discovered by philosophy, are general; all our ideas, in the strictest sense of the word, are particular. All the particular truths about which we are conversant, are properly historical, and compose the furniture of memory. Nor do I include under the term historical, the truths which belong to natural history; for even these two are general. Now, beyond particular truths or individual facts, first perceived and then remembered, we should never be able to proceed one single step in thinking, any more than in conversing without the use of signs.

When it is affirmed that the whole is equal to all its parts, there cannot be an affirmation which is more perfectly intelligible, or which commands a fuller assent. If, in order to comprehend this, I recur to ideas, all that I can do, is to form a notion of some individual whole, divided into a certain number of parts, of which it is constituted, suppose of the year divided into the four seasons. Now all that I can be said to discern here, is the relation of equality between this particular whole and its component parts, If I recur to another example, I only perceive another particular truth. The same holds of a third and of a fourth. But so far am I, after the preception of ten thousand particular similar instances, from the discovery of the universal truth, that if the mind had not the power of considering things as signs, or particular ideas as representing an infinity of others, resembling in one circumstance, though totally dissimilar in every other, I could not so much as conceive the meaning of an universal truth. Hence it is that some ideas, to adopt the expression of the author above quoted, are particular in their nature, but general in their representation,

There is, however, it must be acknowledged, a diffi culty in explaining this power the mind hath, of considering ideas, not in their private, but, as it were, in their representative capacity; which, on that author's system, who divides all the objects of thought into impressions and ideas, will be found altogether insurmountable. It was to avoid this difficulty that philosophers at first recurred, as is sometimes the case, to a still greater, or rather to a downright absurdity, the doctrine of abstract ideas. I mean only that doctrine as it hath been frequently explained; for if any one is pleased to call that faculty by which a particular idea is regarded as representing a whole order, by the name abstraction, I have no objection to the term: nay more, I think it sufficiently expressive of the sense-whilst certain qualities of the individual remain unnoticed, and are therefore abstracted from, those qualities only which it hath in common with the order engross the mind's attention. But this is not what those writers seem to mean, who philosophise upon abstract ideas, as is evident from their own explications.

The patrons of this theory maintain, or at least express themselves, as if they maintained, that the mind is endowed with a power of forming ideas, or images, within itself, that are possessed not only of incongruous, but of inconsistent qualities, of a triangle, for example, that is of all possible dimensions and proportions, both in sides and angles, at once right-angled, acute-angled, and obtuse-angled, equilateral, equicrural, and scalenum. One would have thought, that the bare mention of this hypothesis would have been equivalent to a confutation of it, since it really confutes itself.

Yet in this manner one no less respectable in the philosophic world than Mr Locke, has, on some occasions expressed himself*. I consider the difference, however, on this article, between him and the two authors above mentioned, as more apparent than real, or (which a

Essay on Human Understanding, B. II. C. xi. Sect. 10, 11. B. IV. C. vii. Sect. 9.

mounts to the same thing) more in words than in sentiments. It is indeed scarcely possible that men of discernment, should think differently on a subject so perfectly subjected to every one's own consciousness and experience. What has betrayed the former into such unguarded and improper expressions, is plainly an undue, and till then, unprecedented use of the word idea, which he has employed (for the sake, I suppose of simplifying his system) to signify not only, as formerly, the traces of things retained in the memory, and the images formed by the fancy, but even the preceptions of the senses on the one hand, and the conceptions of the intellect on the other," it being that term which," in his opinion," serves best to stand for whatsoever is the ob"ject of the understanding, when a man thinks*." Accordingly he nowhere, that I remember, defines it with some logicians, "a pattern or copy of a thing in the mind." Nevertheless he has not always, in speaking on the subject, attended to the different acceptation he had in the beginning affixed to the word; but, misled by the common definition (which regards a more limited ob. ject), and applying it to the term in that more extensive import which he had himself given it, has fallen into those inconsistencies in language, which have been before observed. Thus this great man has, in his own example, as it were, demonstrated how difficult it is even for the wisest to guard uniformly against the inconveniencies arising from the ambiguity of words.

But that what I have now advanced is not spoken rashly, and that there was no material difference between his opinion and theirs on this article, is, I think, manifest from the following passage: "To return to general "words, it is plain, by what has been said, that general "and universal belong not to the real existence of things, "but are the inventions and creatures of the understanding, made by it for its own use, and concern only

Essay on Human Understanding, B. 1. C. Sect. 8.

66

signs, whether words or ideas. Words are general, as "has been said, when used for signs of general ideas, and SO are applicable indifferently to many particular "things; and ideas are general, when they are set up as "the representatives of many particular things: but uni"versality belongs not to things themselves which are "all of them particular in their existence; even those "words and ideas which in their signification are general. "When, therefore, we quit particulars, the generals that rest are only creatures of our own making; their ge"neral nature being nothing but the capacity they are put into by the understanding of signifying or repre"senting many particulars. For the signification they "have, is nothing but a relation that by the mind of man "is added to them." Nothing, in my apprehension, can be more exactly coincident with Berkeley's doctrine of abstraction. Here not only words but ideas are made signs; and a particular idea is made general, not by any change produced in it (for then it would be no longer the same idea), but " by being set up as the representative of many particular things." "Universality," he observes, as it belongs not to things, belongs not even to "those words and ideas, which are all of them particular "in their existence, but general in their signification." Again, the general nature of those ideas, is "nothing "but the capacity they are put into by the understand"ing of signifying or representing many particulars ;" and if possible, still more explicitly, "the signification they have is nothing but a relation;" no alteration on their essence, "that by the mind of man is added to

"them."

Some of the greatest admirers of that eminent philo. sopher seem to have overlooked entirely the preceding account of his sentiments on this subject, and though I know not what passion for the paradoxical (I should rather say, the impossible and unintelligible) have shewn an amazing zeal for defending the propriety of the hasty expressions which appear in the passages formerly re

B. III. c. iii. Sect. 11.