To suppose
that the species of things are anything but the sorting of them
under general names, according as they agree to several abstract ideas
of which we make those names the signs, is to confound truth, and
introduce uncertainty into all general propositions that can be made
about them. Though therefore these things might, to people not
possessed with scholastic learning, be treated of in a better and
clearer way; yet those wrong notions of essences or species having got
root in most people's minds who have received any tincture from the
learning which has prevailed in this part of the world, are to be
discovered and removed, to make way for that use of words which should
convey certainty with it.
5. This more particularly concerns substances. The names of
substances, then, whenever made to stand for species which are
supposed to be constituted by real essences which we know not, are not
capable to convey certainty to the understanding. Of the truth of
general propositions made up of such terms we cannot be sure. The
reason whereof is plain: for how can we be sure that this or that
quality is in gold, when we know not what is or is not gold? Since
in this way of speaking, nothing is gold but what partakes of an
essence, which we, not knowing, cannot know where it is or is not, and
so cannot be sure that any parcel of matter in the world is or is
not in this sense gold; being incurably ignorant whether it has or has
not that which makes anything to be called gold; i.
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