46. Instances of a species of substance named Zahab. Let us now also
consider, after the same manner, the names of substances in their
first application. One of Adam's children, roving in the mountains,
lights on a glittering substance which pleases his eye. Home he
carries it to Adam, who, upon consideration of it, finds it to be
hard, to have a bright yellow colour, and an exceeding great weight.
These perhaps, at first, are all the qualities he takes notice of in
it; and abstracting this complex idea, consisting of a substance
having that peculiar bright yellowness, and a weight very great in
proportion to its bulk, he gives the name zahab, to denominate and
mark all substances that have these sensible qualities in them. It
is evident now, that, in this case, Adam acts quite differently from
what he did before, in forming those ideas of mixed modes to which
he gave the names kinneah and niouph. For there he put ideas
together only by his own imagination, not taken from the existence
of anything; and to them he gave names to denominate all things that
should happen to agree to those his abstract ideas, without
considering whether any such thing did exist or not; the standard
there was of his own making. But in the forming his idea of this new
substance, he takes the quite contrary course; here he has a
standard made by nature; and therefore, being to represent that to
himself, by the idea he has of it, even when it is absent, he puts
in no simple idea into his complex one, but what he has the perception
of from the thing itself.
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