fficulty that abstract ideas carry with them, and
the pains and skill requisite to the forming them. And it is on
all hands agreed that there is need of great toil and labour of the mind,
to emancipate our thoughts from particular objects, and raise them to
those sublime speculations that are conversant about 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