18. Different meanings of substance.
I endeavour as much as I can to deliver myself from those fallacies which
we are apt to put upon ourselves, by taking words for things. It helps not our ignorance to feign a knowledge
where we have none, by making a noise with sounds, without clear and distinct significations. Names made at
pleasure, neither alter the nature of things, nor make us understand them, but as they are signs of and stand for
determined ideas. And I desire those who lay so much stress on the sound of these two syllables, substance, to
consider whether applying it, as they do, to the infinite, incomprehensible God, to finite spirits, and to body, it be
in the same sense; and whether it stands for the same idea, when each of those three so different beings are called
substances. If so, whether it will thence follow--that God, spirits, and body, agreeing in the same common nature
of substance, differ not any otherwise than in a bare different modification of that substance; as a tree and a
pebble, being in the same sense body, and agreeing in the common nature of body, differ only in a bare
modification of that common matter, which will be a very harsh doctrine. If they say, that they apply it to God,
finite spirit, and matter, in three different significations and that it stands for one idea when God is said to be a
substance; for another when the soul is called substance; and for a third when body is called so;--if the name
substance stands for three several distinct ideas, they would do well to make known those distinct ideas, or at least
to give three distinct names to them, to prevent in so important a notion the confusion and errors that will
naturally follow from the promiscuous use of so doubtful a term; which is so far from being suspected to have
three distinct, that in ordinary use it has scarce one clear distinct signification. And if they can thus make three
distinct ideas of substance, what hinders why another may not make a fourth?
