This also may show us the reason why for the most part the names of
mixed modes are got before the ideas they stand for are perfectly known.
Because there being no species of these ordinarily taken notice of but
what have names, and those species, or rather their essences, being
abstract complex ideas, made arbitrarily by the mind, it is convenient,
if not necessary, to know the names, before one endeavour to frame
these complex ideas: unless a man will fill his head with a company
of abstract complex ideas, which, others having no names for, he has
nothing to do with, but to lay by and forget again. I confess that, in
the beginning of languages, it was necessary to have the idea before one
gave it the name: and so it is still, where, making a new complex idea,
one also, by giving it a new name, makes a new word. But this concerns
not languages made, which have generally pretty well provided for ideas
which men have frequent occasion to have and communicate; and in such, I
ask whether it be not the ordinary method, that children learn the names
of mixed modes before they have their ideas? What one of a thousand ever
frames the abstract ideas of GLORY and AMBITION, before he has heard the
names of them? In simple ideas and substances I grant it is otherwise;
which, being such ideas as have a real existence and union in nature,
the ideas and names are got one before the other, as it happens.


16. Reason of my being so large on this Subject.

What has been said here of MIXED MODES is, with very little difference,
applicable also to RELATIONS; which, since every man himself may
observe, I may spare myself the pains to enlarge on: especially, since
what I have here said concerning Words in this third Book, will possibly
be thought by some to this be much more than what so slight a subject
required. I allow it might be brought into a narrower compass; but I was