17. Instance, gold. How much this is the case in the greatest part
of disputes that men are engaged so hotly in, I shall perhaps have
an occasion in another place to take notice. Let us only here consider
a little more exactly the forementioned instance of the word gold, and
we shall see how hard it is precisely to determine its
signification. I think all agree to make it stand for a body of a
certain yellow shining colour; which being the idea to which
children have annexed that name, the shining yellow part of a
peacock's tail is properly to them gold. Others finding fusibility
joined with that yellow colour in certain parcels of matter, make of
that combination a complex idea to which they give the name gold, to
denote a sort of substances; and so exclude from being gold all such
yellow shining bodies as by fire will be reduced to ashes; and admit
to be of that species, or to be comprehended under that name gold,
only such substances as, having that shining yellow colour, will by
fire be reduced to fusion, and not to ashes. Another, by the same
reason, adds the weight, which, being a quality as straightly joined
with that colour as its fusibility, he thinks has the same reason to
be joined in its idea, and to be signified by its name: and
therefore the other made up of body, of such a colour and
fusibility, to be imperfect; and so on of all the rest: wherein no one
can show a reason why some of the inseparable qualities, that are
always united in nature, should be put into the nominal essence, and
others left out: or why the word gold, signifying that sort of body
the ring on his finger is made of, should determine that sort rather
by its colour, weight, and fusibility, than by its colour, weight, and
solubility in aqua regia: since the dissolving it by that liquor is as
inseparable from it as the fusion by fire; and they are both of them
nothing but the relation which that substance has to two other bodies,
which have a power to operate differently upon it.
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