And we cannot doubt but law-makers have
often made laws about species of actions which were only the creatures
of their own understandings; beings that had no other existence but in
their own minds. And I think nobody can deny but that the resurrection
was a species of mixed modes in the mind, before it really existed.
6. Instances: murder, incest, stabbing. To see how arbitrarily these
essences of mixed modes are made by the mind, we need but take a
view of almost any of them. A little looking into them will satisfy
us, that it is the mind that combines several scattered independent
ideas into one complex one; and, by the common name it gives them,
makes them the essence of a certain species, without regulating itself
by any connexion they have in nature. For what greater connexion in
nature has the idea of a man than the idea of a sheep with killing,
that this is made a particular species of action, signified by the
word murder, and the other not? Or what union is there in nature
between the idea of the relation of a father with killing than that of
a son or neighbour, that those are combined into one complex idea, and
thereby made the essence of the distinct species parricide, whilst the
other makes no distinct species at all? But, though they have made
killing a man's father or mother a distinct species from killing his
son or daughter, yet, in some other cases, son and daughter are
taken in too, as well as father and mother: and they are all equally
comprehended in the same species, as in that of incest.
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