33. How when they stand for Modes and Relations.

In Modes and Relations generally, we are liable only to the four first
of these inconveniences; viz. 1. I may have in my memory the names of
modes, as GRATITUDE or CHARITY, and yet not have any precise ideas
annexed in my thoughts to those names, 2. I may have ideas, and not know
the names that belong to them: v. g. I may have the idea of a man's
drinking till his colour and humour be altered, till his tongue trips,
and his eyes look red, and his feet fail him; and yet not know that
it is to be called DRUNKENNESS. 3. I may have the ideas of virtues or
vices, and names also, but apply them amiss: v. g. when I apply the name
FRUGALITY to that idea which others call and signify by this sound,
COVETOUSNESS. 4. I may use any of those names with inconstancy. 5. But,
in modes and relations, I cannot have ideas disagreeing to the existence
of things: for modes being complex ideas, made by the mind at pleasure,
and relation being but by way of considering or comparing two things
together, and so also an idea of my own making, these ideas can scarce
be found to disagree with anything existing; since they are not in the
mind as the copies of things regularly made by nature, nor as properties
inseparably flowing from the internal constitution or essence of any
substance; but, as it were, patterns lodged in my memory, with names
annexed to them, to denominate actions and relations by, as they come
to exist. But the mistake is commonly in my giving a wrong name to my
conceptions; and so using words in a different sense from other people:
I am not understood, but am thought to have wrong ideas of them, when I
give wrong names to them. Only if I put in my ideas of mixed modes or
relations any inconsistent ideas together, I fill my head also with
chimeras; since such ideas, if well examined, cannot so much as exist in
the mind, much less any real being ever be denominated from them.