But when a cylindrical mirror, placed right, had reduced those
irregular lines on the table into their due order and proportion, then
the confusion ceases, and the eye presently sees that it is a man,
or Caesar; i.e. that it belongs to those names; and that it is
sufficiently distinguishable from a baboon, or Pompey; i.e. from the
ideas signified by those names. Just thus it is with our ideas,
which are as it were the pictures of things. No one of these mental
draughts, however the parts are put together, can be called confused
(for they are plainly discernible as they are) till it be ranked under
some ordinary name to which it cannot be discerned to belong, any more
than it does to some other name of an allowed different signification.
9. Their simple ones mutable and undetermined. Thirdly, A third
defect that frequently gives the name of confused to our ideas, is,
when any one of them is uncertain and undetermined. Thus we may
observe men who, not forbearing to use the ordinary words of their
language till they have learned their precise signification, change
the idea they make this or that term stand for, almost as often as
they use it. He that does this out of uncertainty of what he should
leave out, or put into his idea of church, or idolatry, every time
he thinks of either, and holds not steady to any one precise
combination of ideas that makes it up, is said to have a confused idea
of idolatry or the church: though this be still for the same reason as
the former, viz.
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