by the pencil.

30. Yet, imperfect as they thus are, they serve for common converse.

But though this serves well enough for gross and confused conceptions,
and inaccurate ways of talking and thinking; yet MEN ARE FAR ENOUGH
FROM HAVING AGREED ON THE PRECISE NUMBER OF SIMPLE IDEAS OR QUALITIES
BELONGING TO ANY SORT OF THINGS, SIGNIFIED BY ITS NAME. Nor is it a
wonder; since it requires much time, pains, and skill, strict inquiry,
and long examination to find out what, and how many, those simple ideas
are, which are constantly and inseparably united in nature, and are
always to be found together in the same subject. Most men, wanting
either time, inclination, or industry enough for this, even to some
tolerable degree, content themselves with some few obvious and outward
appearances of things, thereby readily to distinguish and sort them for
the common affairs of life: and so, without further examination, give
them names, or take up the names already in use. Which, though in common
conversation they pass well enough for the signs of some few obvious
qualities co-existing, are yet far enough from comprehending, in a
settled signification, a precise number of simple ideas, much less all
those which are united in nature. He that shall consider, after so
much stir about genus and species, and such a deal of talk of specific
differences, how few words we have yet settled definitions of, may with
reason imagine, that those FORMS which there hath been so much noise
made about are only chimeras, which give us no light into the specific
natures of things. And he that shall consider how far the names of
substances are from having significations wherein all who use them do
agree, will have reason to conclude that, though the nominal essences of
substances are all supposed to be copied from nature, yet they are all,
or most of them, very imperfect. Since the composition of those complex
ideas are, in several men, very different: and therefore that these
boundaries of species are as men, and not as Nature, makes them, if at
least there are in nature any such prefixed bounds. It is true that many
particular substances are so made by Nature, that they have agreement
and likeness one with another, and so afford a foundation of being
ranked into sorts. But the sorting of things by us, or the making of
determinate species, being in order to naming and comprehending them
under general terms, I cannot see how it can be properly said, that