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An essay concerning human understanding

  
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To The Right Honourable Lord Thomas,
  
Epistle to the Reader

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Introduction An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
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Book I Neither Principles Nor Ideas Are Innate
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Book II Of Ideas
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Book III Of Words
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Chapter I Of Words or Language in General
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Chapter II Of the Signification of Words
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Chapter III Of General Terms
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Chapter IV Of the Names of Simple Ideas
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Chapter V Of the Names of Mixed Modes and Relations
  
1. Mixed modes stand for abstract ideas, as other general names.
  
2. First, The abstract ideas they stand for are made by the understanding.
  
3. Secondly, made arbitrarily, and without patterns.
  
4. How this is done.
  
5. Evidently arbitrary, in that the idea is often before the existence.
  
6. Instances: murder, incest, stabbing.
  
7. But still subservient to the end of language, and not made at random.
  
8. Whereof the intranslatable words of divers languages are a proof.
  
9. This shows species to be made for communication.
  
10. In mixed modes it is the name that ties the combination of simple ideas together, and makes it a species.
  
11.
  
12. For the originals of our mixed modes, we look no further than the mind; which also shows them to he the workmanship of the understanding.
  
13. Their being made by the understanding without patterns, shows the reason why they are so compounded.
  
14. Names of mixed modes stand always for their real essences, which are the workmanship of our minds.
  
15. Why their names are usually got before their ideas.
  
16. Reason of my being so large on this subject.
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Chapter VI Of the Names of Substances
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Chapter VII Of Particles
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Chapter VIII Of Abstract and Concrete Terms
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Chapter IX Of the Imperfection of Words
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Chapter X Of the Abuse of Words
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Chapter XI Of the Remedies of the Foregoing Imperfections and Abuses of Words
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Book IV Of Knowledge and Probability

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13. These three laws the rules of moral good and evil.

These three then, first, the law of God; secondly, the law of politic societies; thirdly, the law of fashion, or private censure, are those to which men variously compare their actions: and it is by their conformity to one of these laws that they take their measures, when they would judge of their moral rectitude, and denominate their actions good or bad.

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