Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/163

 by names, but those abstract ideas in the mind, which are as it were the bonds between particular things that exist," &c. For my own part I must confess that I agree with the Bishop of Worcester on this occasion, who asks, "What is it that makes Peter, James, and John real men? Is it the attributing the general name to them? No, certainly, but that the true and real essence of a man is in every one of them. They take their denomination of being men from that common nature or essence which is in them." On the opposite system it is not the nature of the thing which determines the imposition of the name, but the imposition of the name which determines the nature of the thing; or giving them the name makes Peter, James, and John men, as in the opinion of some divines Baptism makes them Christians. That there is a real difference in things and ideas, answering to their general names, appears evident from this single observation, that if it were not so, we could never know how to apply these general names, and we could no more distinguish between a man and a horse than we could tell at first sight, that one man's proper name was John and another's Thomas. The puzzle about genera and species, in this view of the question, seems to arise from a very obvious transposition of ideas. Because the abstracting or separating these general ideas from particular circumstances is the workmanship of the understanding: it has, therefore, been inferred, that the ideas themselves are so too, and that they exist no where but in the mind which perceives them.

But I would fain ask, in the account which Mr. Locke gives of the abstract ideas of animal for example, whether body, sense, and motion, as they exist in different individuals, have not a general nature, or something common in all those individuals. If body in one case expresses the