abstract ideas.  From all which the natural consequence should seem to be, that so difficult a thing as the forming abstract ideas was not necessary for communication, which is so easy and familiar to all sorts of men.  But, we are told, if they seem obvious and easy to grown men, it is only because by constant and familiar use they are made so.  Now, I would fain know at what time it is men are employed in surmounting that difficulty, and furnishing themselves with those necessary helps for discourse.  It cannot be when they are grown up, for then it seems they are not conscious of any such painstaking; it remains therefore to be the business of their childhood.  And surely the great and multiplied labour of framing abstract notions will be found a hard task for that tender age.  Is it not a hard thing to imagine that a couple of children cannot prate together of their sugar-plums and rattles and the rest of their little trinkets, till they have first tacked together numberless inconsistencies, and so framed in their minds abstract general ideas, and annexed them to every common name they make use of?

15.  Nor for the enlargement of knowledge.—­Nor do I think them a whit more needful for the enlargement of knowledge than for communication.  It is, I know, a point much insisted on, that all knowledge and demonstration are about universal notions, to which I fully agree:  but then it doth not appear to me that those notions are formed by abstraction in the manner premised—­universality, so far as I can comprehend, not consisting in the absolute, positive nature or conception of anything, but in the relation it bears to the particulars signified or represented by it; by virtue whereof it is that things, names, or notions, being in their own nature particular, are rendered universal.  Thus, when I demonstrate any proposition concerning triangles, it is to be supposed that I have in view the universal idea of a triangle; which ought not to be understood as if I could frame an idea of a triangle which was neither equilateral, nor scalenon, nor equicrural; but only that the particular triangle I consider, whether of this or that sort it matters not, doth equally stand for and represent all rectilinear triangles whatsoever, and is in that sense universal.  All which seems very plain and not to include any difficulty in it.