g. when I apply the name
frugality to that idea which others call and signify by this sound,
covetousness. 4. I may use any of those names with inconstancy. 5.
But, in modes and relations, I cannot have ideas disagreeing to the
existence of things: for modes being complex ideas, made by the mind
at pleasure, and relation being but by way of considering or comparing
two things together, and so also an idea of my own making, these ideas
can scarce be found to disagree with anything existing; since they are
not in the mind as the copies of things regularly made by nature,
nor as properties inseparably flowing from the internal constitution
or essence of any substance; but, as it were, patterns lodged in my
memory, with names annexed to them, to denominate actions and
relations by, as they come to exist. But the mistake is commonly in my
giving a wrong name to my conceptions; and so using words in a
different sense from other people: I am not understood, but am thought
to have wrong ideas of them, when I give wrong names to them. Only
if I put in my ideas of mixed modes or relations any inconsistent
ideas together, I fill my head also with chimeras; since such ideas,
if well examined, cannot so much as exist in the mind, much less any
real being ever be denominated from them.
34. Seventhly, language is often abused by figurative speech.
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