least hesitation one nut for another, are we to think he has any
general idea of that kind of fruit, and that he compares these two
individual bodies with his archetype notion of them? No, certainly;
but the sight of one of these nuts calls back to his memory the
sensations which he has received from the other; and his eyes,
modified after some certain manner, give notice to his palate of the
modification it is in its turn going to receive. Every general idea is
purely intellectual; let the imagination tamper ever so little with
it, it immediately becomes a particular idea. Endeavour to represent
to yourself the image of a tree in general, you never will be able to
do it; in spite of all your efforts it will appear big or little, thin
or tufted, of a bright or a deep colour; and were you master to see
nothing in it, but what can be seen in every tree, such a picture
would no longer resemble any tree. Beings perfectly abstract are
perceivable in the same manner, or are only conceivable by the
assistance of speech. The definition of a triangle can alone give you
a just idea of that figure: the moment you form a triangle in your
mind, it is this or that particular triangle and no other, and you
cannot avoid giving breadth to its lines and colour to its area. We
must therefore make use of propositions; we must therefore speak to
have general ideas; for the moment the imagination stops, the mind
must stop too, if not assisted by speech. If therefore the first
inventors could give no names to any ideas but those they had already,
it follows that the first substantives could never have been anything
more than proper names.

But when by means, which I cannot conceive, our new grammarians began
to extend their ideas, and generalize their words, the ignorance of
the inventors must have confined this method to very narrow bounds;
and as they had at first too much multiplied the names of individuals