With this design,
therefore, I shall go on with what I have further to say concerning
this matter.
Chapter VI
Of the Names of Substances
1. The common names of substances stand for sorts. The common
names of substances, as well as other general terms, stand for
sorts: which is nothing else but the being made signs of such
complex ideas wherein several particular substances do or might agree,
by virtue of which they are capable of being comprehended in one
common conception, and signified by one name. I say do or might agree:
for though there be but one sun existing in the world, yet the idea of
it being abstracted, so that more substances (if there were several)
might each agree in it, it is as much a sort as if there were as
many suns as there are stars. They want not their reasons who think
there are, and that each fixed star would answer the idea the name sun
stands for, to one who was placed in a due distance: which, by the
way, may show us how much the sorts, or, if you please, genera and
species of things (for those Latin terms signify to me no more than
the English word sort) depend on such collections of ideas as men have
made, and not on the real nature of things; since it is not impossible
but that, in propriety of speech, that might be a sun to one which
is a star to another.
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