An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 429 pages of information about An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2.

An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 429 pages of information about An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2.
sorts; and then watch will be a generical name.  But yet they would be no distinct species to men ignorant of clock-work, and the inward contrivances of watches, who had no other idea but the outward shape and bulk, with the marking of the hours by the hand.  For to them all those other names would be but synonymous terms for the same idea, and signify no more, nor no other thing but a watch.  Just thus I think it is in natural things.  Nobody will doubt that the wheels or springs (if I may so say) within, are different in a rational man and a changeling; no more than that there is a difference in the frame between a drill and a changeling.  But whether one or both these differences be essential or specifical, is only to be known to us by their agreement or disagreement with the complex idea that the name man stands for:  for by that alone can it be determined whether one, or both, or neither of those be a man.

40.  Species of Artificial Things less confused than Natural.

From what has been before said, we may see the reason why, in the species of artificial things, there is generally less confusion and uncertainty than in natural.  Because an artificial thing being a production of man, which the artificer designed, and therefore well knows the idea of, the name of it is supposed to stand for no other idea, nor to import any other essence, than what is certainly to be known, and easy enough to be apprehended.  For the idea or essence of the several sorts of artificial things, consisting for the most part in nothing but the determinate figure of sensible parts, and sometimes motion depending thereon, which the artificer fashions in matter, such as he finds for his turn; it is not beyond the reach of our faculties to attain a certain idea thereof; and so settle the signification of the names whereby the species of artificial things are distinguished, with less doubt, obscurity, and equivocation than we can in things natural, whose differences and operations depend upon contrivances beyond the reach of our discoveries.

41.  Artificial Things of distinct Species.

I must be excused here if I think artificial things are of distinct species as well as natural:  since I find they are as plainly and orderly ranked into sorts, by different abstract ideas, with general names annexed to them, as distinct one from another as those of natural substances.  For why should we not think a watch and pistol as distinct species one from another, as a horse and a dog; they being expressed in our minds by distinct ideas, and to others by distinct appellations?

42.  Substances alone, of all our several sorts of ideas, have proper Names.

This is further to be observed concerning substances, that they alone of all our several sorts of ideas have particular or proper names, whereby one only particular thing is signified.  Because in simple ideas, modes, and relations, it seldom happens that men have occasion to mention often this or that particular when it is absent.  Besides, the greatest part of mixed modes, being actions which perish in their birth, are not capable of a lasting duration, as substances which are the actors; and wherein the simple ideas that make up the complex ideas designed by the name have a lasting union.

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An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.