Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/159

 being made the signs of general ideas, and ideas become general by separating from them the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence. By this way of abstraction they are made capable of representing more individuals than one, each of which having in it a conformity to that abstract idea is (as we call it) of that sort.

But to deduce this a little more distinctly, it will not, perhaps, be amiss to trace our notions and names from their beginning, and observe by what degrees we proceed, and by what steps we enlarge our ideas from their first infancy. There is nothing more evident than that the ideas of the persons children converse with, are like the persons themselves, only particulars. The ideas of the nurse and the mother are well framed in the mind and like pictures of them there, represent only those individuals. The names they first give rise to are confined to these individuals, and the names of nurse and mamma which the child uses, determine themselves to those persons. Afterwards when time and a larger acquaintance has made them observe that there are a great many other things in the world, that in some common agreements of shape, and several other properties 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 Man, for example And thus they come to have a general name, and a general idea. Wherein they make nothing 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 what is common to them all. 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