182. Berkeley’s answer to these questions must be gathered from his theory of general names. ‘It is, I know,’ he says, ‘a point much insisted on, that all knowledge and demonstration are about universal notions, to which I fully agree: but then it does not appear to me that those notions are formed by abstraction--_universality_, so far as I can comprehend, not consisting in the absolute positive nature or conception of anything, but in the relation it bears to the particulars signified or represented by it; by virtue whereof it is that things, names, or notions, being in their own nature _particular_, are rendered universal. Thus, when I demonstrate any proposition concerning triangles, it is to be supposed that I have in view the universal idea of a triangle; which is not to be understood as if I could frame an idea of a triangle which was neither equilateral nor scalene nor equicrural; but only that the particular triangle I considered, whether of this or that sort it matters not, doth equally stand for and represent all rectilinear triangles whatsoever, and is in that sense universal.’ Thus it is that ‘a man may consider a figure merely as triangular.’ (‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ Introd. secs. 15 and 16.) ... of value, as implying that universality of ideas lies in relation. 183. In this passage appear the beginnings of a process of thought which, if it had been systematically pursued by Berkeley, might have brought him to understand by the ‘percipi,’ to which he pronounced ‘esse’ equivalent, definitely the ‘intelligi.’ As it stands, the result of the passage merely is that the triangle (for instance) ‘in its own nature,’ because ‘particular,’ is not a possible subject of general predication or reasoning: that it is so only as ‘considered’ under a relation of resemblance to other triangles and by such consideration universalized. ‘In its own nature,’ or as a ‘particular idea,’ the triangle, we must suppose, is so much tangible (or visible, as symbolical of tangible) extension, and therefore according to Berkeley a feeling. But a relation, as he virtually admits, [1] is neither a feeling nor felt. The triangle, then, as considered under relation and thus a possible subject of general propositions, is quite other than the triangle in its own nature. This, of course, is so far merely a virtual repetition of Locke’s embarrassing doctrine that real things are not the things which we speak of, and which are the subject of our sciences; but it is a repetition with two fruitful differences--one, that the thing in its ‘absolute positive nature’ is more explicitly identified with feeling; the other, that the process, by which the thing thought and spoken of is supposed to be derived from the real thing, is no longer one of ‘abstraction,’ but consists in consideration of relation. It is true that with Berkeley the mere feeling has a ‘positive nature’ apart from considered relations, [2] and that the considered