And yet of all those distinct species, for the reasons above said,
we have no clear distinct ideas.
13. The nominal essence that of the species, as conceived by us,
proved from water and ice. But to return to the species of corporeal
substances. If I should ask any one whether ice and water were two
distinct species of things, I doubt not but I should be answered in
the affirmative: and it cannot be denied but he that says they are two
distinct species is in the right. But if an Englishman bred in
Jamaica, who perhaps had never seen nor heard of ice, coming into
England in the winter, find the water he put in his basin at night
in a great part frozen in the morning, and, not knowing any peculiar
name it had, should call it hardened water; I ask whether this would
be a new species to him, different from water? And I think it would be
answered here, It would not be to him a new species, no more than
congealed jelly, when it is cold, is a distinct species from the
same jelly fluid and warm; or than liquid gold in the furnace is a
distinct species from hard gold in the hands of a workman. And if this
be so, it is plain that our distinct species are nothing but
distinct complex ideas, with distinct names annexed to them. It is
true every substance that exists has its peculiar constitution,
whereon depend those sensible qualities and powers we observe in it;
but the ranking of things into species (which is nothing but sorting
them under several titles) is done by us according to the ideas that
we have of them: which, though sufficient to distinguish them by
names, so that we may be able to discourse of them when we have them
not present before us; yet if we suppose it to be done by their real
internal constitutions, and that things existing are distinguished
by nature into species, by real essences, according as we
distinguish them into species by names, we shall be liable to great
mistakes.
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