14. Our specific ideas of substances.
But to return to the matter in hand,--the ideas we have of substances, and the
ways we come by them. I say, our specific ideas of substances are nothing else but a collection of a certain
number of simple ideas, considered as united in one thing. These ideas of substances, though they are commonly
simple apprehensions, and the names of them simple terms, yet in effect are complex and compounded. Thus the
idea which an Englishman signifies by the name swan, is white colour, long neck, red beak, black legs, and whole
feet, and all these of a certain size, with a power of swimming in the water, and making a certain kind of noise,
and perhaps, to a man who has long observed this kind of birds, some other properties: which all terminate in
sensible simple ideas, all united in one common subject.
