8. How men suppose that their ideas must correspond to things, and to the customary meanings of names.
But this
abstract idea, being something in the mind, between the thing that exists, and the name that is given to it; it is in
our ideas that both the rightness of our knowledge, and the propriety and intelligibleness of our speaking, consists.
And hence it is that men are so forward to suppose, that the abstract ideas they have in their minds are such as
agree to the things existing without them, to which they are referred; and are the same also to which the names
they give them do by the use and propriety of that language belong. For without this double conformity of their
ideas, they find they should both think amiss of things in themselves, and talk of them unintelligibly to others.
