217. The question about ‘generality of signification,’ as he puts it, comes to this. In every proposition, though its subject be a common noun, we necessarily present to ourselves some one individual object ‘with all its particular circumstances and proportions.’ How then can the proposition be general in denotation and connotation? How can it be made with reference to a multitude of individual objects other than that presented to the mind, and how can it concern only such of the qualities of the latter as are common to the multitude? The first part of the question is answered as follows:-‘When we have found a resemblance among several objects that often occur to us, we apply the same name to all of them ... whatever differences may appear among them. After we have acquired a custom of this kind, the hearing of that name revives the idea of one of these objects, and makes the imagination conceive it with all its particular circumstances and proportions. But as the same word is supposed to have been frequently applied to other individuals, that are different in many respects from that idea which is immediately present to the mind, the word not being able to revive the idea of all these individuals, only touches the soul and revives that custom which we have acquired by surveying them. They are not really and in fact present to the mind, but only in power. ... The word raises up an individual idea along with a certain custom, and that custom produces any other individual one for which we may have occasion. ... Thus, should we mention the word triangle and form the idea of a particular equilateral one to correspond to it, and should we afterwards assert _that the three angles of a triangle are equal to each other_, the other individuals of a scalenum and isosceles, which we overlooked at first, immediately crowd in upon us and make us perceive the falsehood of this proposition, though it be true with relation to that idea which we had formed’. [1] [1] p. 328 [Book I, part I., sec. VII.]