does the word
TRIUMPHUS hold together, and deliver to us as one species! Had this name
been never made, or quite lost, we might, no doubt, have had
descriptions of what passed in that solemnity: but yet, I think, that
which holds those different parts together, in the unity of one complex
idea, is that very word annexed to it; without which the several parts
of that would no more be thought to make one thing, than any other show,
which having never been made but once, had never been united into one
complex idea, under one denomination. How much, therefore, in mixed
modes, the unity necessary to any essence depends on the mind; and how
much the continuation and fixing of that unity depends on the name in
common use annexed to it, I leave to be considered by those who look
upon essences and species as real established things in nature.
11.
Suitable to this, we find that men speaking of mixed modes, seldom
imagine or take any other for species of them, but such as are set out
by name: because they, being of man's making only, in order to naming,
no such species are taken notice of, or supposed to be, unless a name be
joined to it, as the sign of man's having combined into one idea several
loose ones; and by that name giving a lasting union to the parts which
would otherwise cease to have any, as soon as the mind laid by that
abstract idea, and ceased actually to think on it. But when a name
is once annexed to it, wherein the parts of that complex idea have
a settled and permanent union, then is the essence, as it were,
established, and the species looked on as complete. For to what purpose
should the memory charge itself with such compositions, unless it were
by abstraction to make them general? And to what purpose make them
general, unless it were that they might have general names for the
convenience of discourse and communication? Thus we see, that killing a
man with a sword or a hatchet are looked on as no distinct species of
action; but if the point of the sword first enter the body, it passes
for a distinct species, where it has a distinct name, as in England, in
whose language it is called STABBING: but in another country, where it
has not happened to be specified under a peculiar name, it passes not
for a distinct species. But in the species of corporeal substances,
though it be the mind that makes the nominal essence, yet, since those
ideas which are combined in it are supposed to have an union in nature
whe
|