extension, and weight; and the Latin names, HORA, PES, LIBRA, are
without difficulty rendered by the English names, HOUR, FOOT, and POUND:
but yet there is nothing more evident than that the ideas a Roman
annexed to these Latin names, were very far different from those which
an Englishman expresses by those English ones. And if either of these
should make use of the measures that those of the other language
designed by their names, he would be quite out in his account. These are
too sensible proofs to be doubted; and we shall find this much more so
in the names of more abstract and compounded ideas, such as are the
greatest part of those which make up moral discourses: whose names, when
men come curiously to compare with those they are translated into, in
other languages, they will find very few of them exactly to correspond
in the whole extent of their significations.


9. This shows Species to be made for Communication.

The reason why I take so particular notice of this is, that we may not
be mistaken about GENERA and SPECIES, and their ESSENCES, as if they
were things regularly and constantly made by nature, and had a real
existence in things; when they appear, upon a more wary survey, to
be nothing else but an artifice of the understanding, for the easier
signifying such collections of ideas as it should often have occasion to
communicate by one general term; under which divers particulars, as far
forth as they agreed to that abstract idea, might be comprehended. And
if the doubtful signification of the word SPECIES may make it sound
harsh to some, that I say the species of mixed modes are 'made by the
understanding'; yet, I think, it can by nobody be denied that it is the
mind makes those abstract complex ideas to which specific names are
given. And if it be true, as it is, that the mind makes the patterns for