them, and so a species be constituted, before any one individual of
that species ever existed. Who can doubt but the ideas of SACRILEGE or
ADULTERY might be framed in the minds of men, and have names given them,
and so these species of mixed modes be constituted, before either of
them was ever committed; and might be as well discoursed of and reasoned
about, and as certain truths discovered of them, whilst yet they had no
being but in the understanding, as well as now, that they have but too
frequently a real existence? Whereby it is plain how much the sorts of
mixed modes are the creatures of the understanding, where they have a
being as subservient to all the ends of real truth and knowledge, as
when they really 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