For those being
combinations of simple ideas put together, and united under one
general name, it is plain that the mind of man uses some kind of
liberty in forming those complex ideas: how else comes it to pass that
one man's idea of gold, or justice, is different from another's, but
because he has put in, or left out of his, some simple idea which
the other has not? The question then is, Which of these are real,
and which barely imaginary combinations? What collections agree to the
reality of things, and what not? And to this I say that,
4. Mixed modes and relations, made of consistent ideas, are real.
Secondly, Mixed modes and relations, having no other reality but
what they have in the minds of men, there is nothing more required
to this kind of ideas to make them real, but that they be so framed,
that there be a possibility of existing conformable to them. These
ideas themselves, being archetypes, cannot differ from their
archetypes, and so cannot be chimerical, unless any one will jumble
together in them inconsistent ideas. Indeed, as any of them have the
names of a known language assigned to them, by which he that has
them in his mind would signify them to others, so bare possibility
of existing is not enough; they must have a conformity to the ordinary
signification of the name that is given them, that they may not be
thought fantastical: as if a man would give the name of justice to
that idea which common use calls liberality.
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