Mr. Locke at first here evidently supposes that we have ideas answering to general terms, i.e. certain ideas of such particulars as a number of things are found to agree in, or that there are some common qualities by retaining which and only leaving out what is peculiar and foreign, without adding anything new, we get at the general notion. He afterwards to all appearance reduces these general notions to mere signs or sounds with which several particular ideas are associated, but which do not correspond to any common properties or general nature really inhering in these particular things. In the same manner he continues to take different sides of the question, when he comes to treat of genera, and species, when his antipathy to the word _essence_ constantly drives him back into the notion that all our ideas of essences are mere terms, and the want of solidity in that opinion again as constantly disposes him to admit a real difference in the sorts of things, besides the difference of the names we give to them. For immediately after affirming that the abstract essences of things are the workmanship of the understanding, he adds, ‘I would not here be thought to forget, much less to deny, that nature, in the production of things makes several of them alike: there is nothing more obvious, especially in the races of animals, and all things propagated by seed. But yet, I think we may say, the sorting of them by names is the workmanship of the understanding taking occasion from the similitude it observes amongst them to make abstract general ideas, and set them up as patterns in forms (for in that sense the word form has a very proper signification), to which as particular things existing are found to agree, so they come to be of that species, have that denomination, or are put into that class. For when we say this is a _man_, that a _horse_, &c. what do we else but rank things under different specific names, as agreeing to those abstract ideas, of which we have made these names the signs? And what are the essences of those species set out and marked by names, but those abstract ideas in the mind, which are as it were the bonds between particular things that exist,’ &c. For my own part I must confess that I agree with the Bishop of Worcester on this occasion, who asks, ‘What is it that makes Peter, James, and John real men? Is it the attributing the general name to them? No, certainly, but that the true and real essence of a man is in every one of them. They take their denomination of being men from that common nature or essence which is in them.’ On the opposite system it is not the nature of the thing which determines the imposition of the name, but the imposition of the name which determines the nature of the thing; or giving them the name makes Peter, James, and John men, as in the opinion of some divines Baptism makes them Christians. That there is a real difference in things and ideas, answering to their general names,