Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/516

 502 HUBERT FOSTON : The constituents of Locke's nominal essences are re- cognised as being so selected from amongst the actual pro- perties of things as to measure out certain species of things framing them in a conformity to nature sufficient to sub- serve the purposes of social communication. 1 The real essence is the secret constitution conditioning the properties of the species. 2 So far, however, as these properties are only powers, which (while they make a great part of our complex ideas of substance) 3 are not really in the substance considered barely in itself, but " are nothing else but so many relations to other substances," they plainly wait for the substances of different sorts mutually " to operate " on each other before they come to that manifestation and human notice which alone can render their conditions the basis of a nominal essence. 4 This seems threatening to Locke's con- finement of the real essence on which the nominal essence depends 5 to being " that particular constitution which every- thing has in itself, without any relation to anything without it " ; 6 since such a basis involves the concurrence of sub- stances not of one sort, but of different sorts. He himself, indeed, can refuse 7 to consider substances " each of them as. an entire thing by itself, having all its qualities in itself," and suggest for their powers a cosmic dependence, ranging " not only beyond this our earth, and atmosphere, but even beyond the sun, or remotest star our eyes have yet dis- covered ". " If some one of the stars or great bodies incom- prehensibly remote from us, should cease to be or move as. it does," then, " perhaps, things in this our mansion, would put on quite another face, and cease to be what they are." But with what effect, we may ask, on nominal essences,, and with what disclosure, upon the whole, of their true conditions? "This," he says, "is certain, Things however absolute and entire they seem in themselves, are but retainers- to other parts of nature, for that which they are most taken notice of by us." It would seem, then, that Locke comes nearer than he is aware to finding the actual sustaining condition of the nominal essences not, indeed, in any con- fined and rigid real essences of substances of particular sorts,, but in the constant maintenance of order and system in the immeasurable dependences of things. As after Socrates, so after Locke, one could imagine the 1 Bk. iii., ch. vi., 29, 30, 35. 2 Bk iii., ch. vi., 6. 3 Bk. ii, ch. xxiii., 8. 8 Bk. iii., ch. vi., 2. 6 Bk. iii., ch. vi., 6. 7 Bk. iv., ch. vi. 3 11.
 * Cf. bk. ii., ch. xxiii., 37, etid; also cf. bk. ii., ch. xxxi., 8 end.