ly exist. And we cannot doubt but law-makers have often
made laws about species of actions which were only the creatures of
their own understandings; beings that had no other existence but in
their own minds. And I think nobody can deny but that the RESURRECTION
was a species of mixed modes in the mind, before it really existed.

6. Instances: Murder, Incest, Stabbing.

To see how arbitrarily these essences of mixed modes are made by the
mind, we need but take a view of almost any of them. A little looking
into them will satisfy us, that it is the mind that combines several
scattered independent ideas into one complex one; and, by the common
name it gives them, makes them the essence of a certain species, without
regulating itself by any connexion they have in nature. For what greater
connexion in nature has the idea of a man than the idea of a sheep with
killing, that this is made a particular species of action, signified by
the word MURDER, and the other not? Or what union is there in nature
between the idea of the relation of a father with killing than that of
a son or neighbour, that those are combined into one complex idea, and
thereby made the essence of the distinct species PARRICIDE, whilst the
other makes no distinct species at all? But, though they have made
killing a man's father or mother a distinct species from killing his son
or daughter, yet, in some other cases, son and daughter are taken in
too, as well as father and mother: and they are all equally comprehended
in the same species, as in that of INCEST. Thus the mind in mixed modes
arbitrarily unites into complex ideas such as it finds convenient;
whilst others that have altogether as much union in nature are left
loose, and never combined into one idea, because they have no need of
one name. It is evident then that the mind, by its free choice, gives
a connexion to a certain number of ideas, which in nature have no more
union with one another than others that it leaves out: why else is the
part of the weapon the beginning of the wound is made with taken notice
of, to make the distinct species called STABBING, and the figure and
matter of the weapon left out? I do not say this is done without reason,
as we shall see more by and by; but this I say, that it is done by the
free choice of the mind, pursuing its own ends; and that, therefore,
these species of mixed modes are the workmanship of the understanding.
And there is nothing more evident than that