4. How this is done.
To understand this right, we must consider wherein this making of these complex ideas
consists; and that is not in the making any new idea, but putting together those which the mind had before.
Wherein the mind does these three things: First, It chooses a certain number; Secondly, It gives them connexion,
and makes them into one idea; Thirdly, It ties them together by a name. If we examine how the mind proceeds in
these, and what liberty it takes in them, we shall easily observe how these essences of the species of mixed modes
are the workmanship of the mind; and, consequently, that the species themselves are of men's making. Evidently
arbitrary, in that the idea is often before the existence. Nobody can doubt but that these ideas of mixed modes are
made by a voluntary collection of ideas, put together in the mind, independent from any original patterns in
nature, who will but reflect that this sort of complex ideas may be made, abstracted, and have names given them,
and so a species be constituted, before any one individual of that species ever existed. Who can doubt but the
ideas of sacrilege or adultery might be framed in the minds of men, and have names given them, and so these
species of mixed modes be constituted, before either of them was ever committed; and might be as well
discoursed of and reasoned about, and as certain truths discovered of them, whilst yet they had no being but in the
understanding, as well as now, that they have but too frequently a real existence? Whereby it is plain how much
the sorts of mixed modes are the creatures of the understanding, where they have a being as subservient to all the
ends of real truth and knowledge, as when they really exist. And we cannot doubt but law-makers have often
made laws about species of actions which were only the creatures of their own understandings; beings that had no
other existence but in their own minds. And I think nobody can deny but that the resurrection was a species of
mixed modes in the mind, before it really existed.
