79. This latter theory has so far become part and parcel of the ‘common sense’ of educated men, that it might seem scarcely to need restatement. It is generally regarded as completing the work, which Bacon had begun, of transferring philosophy from the scholastic bondage of words to the fruitful discipline of facts. In the process of transmission and popular adaptation, however, its true significance has been lost sight of, and it has been forgotten that to its original exponent implicitly--explicitly to his more logical disciple--though it did indeed distinguish effectively between things and the meaning of words, it was the analysis of the latter only, and not the understanding of things, that it left as the possible function of knowledge. It will be well, then, in what follows, first briefly to restate the theory in its general form; then to show how it conflicts with the actual knowledge which mankind supposes itself to have attained; and finally to exhibit at once the necessity of this conflict as a result of Locke’s governing ideas, and the ambiguities by which he disguised it from himself. What Locke understood by essence. 80. The essence of a thing with Locke, in the only sense in which we can know or intelligibly speak of it, is the meaning of its name. This, again, is an ‘abstract or general idea,’ which means that it is an idea ‘separated from the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine it to this or that particular existence. By this way of abstraction it is made capable of representing more individuals than one; each of which, having in it a conformity to that abstract idea, is (as we call it) of that sort.’ (Book III. chap. iii. sec. 6.) That which is given in immediate experience, as he proceeds to explain, is this or that ‘particular existence,’ Peter or James, Mary or Jane, such particular existence being already a complex idea. [1] That it should be so is indeed in direct contradiction to his doctrine of the primariness of the simple idea, but is necessary to his doctrine of abstraction. Some part of the complex idea (it is supposed)--less or more--we proceed to leave out. The minimum of subtraction would seem to be that of the ‘circumstances of time and place,’ in which the particular existence is given. This is the ‘separation of ideas,’ first made, and alone suffices to constitute an ‘abstract idea,’ even though, as is the case with the idea of the sun, there is only one ‘particular substance’ to agree with it. (Book III. chap. vi. sec. 1.) In proportion as the particular substances compared are more various, the subtraction of ideas is larger, but, be it less or more, the remainder is the abstract idea, to which a name--_e.g._ man--is annexed, and to which as a ‘species’ or ‘standard’ other particular existences, on being ‘found to agree with it,’ may be referred, so as to be called by the same name. These ideas then, ‘tied together