10. In mixed modes it is the name that ties the combination of simple ideas together, and makes it a species.
The
near relation that there is between species, essences, and their general name, at least in mixed modes, will further
appear when we consider, that it is the name that seems to preserve those essences, and give them their lasting
duration. For, the connexion between the loose parts of those complex ideas being made by the mind, this union,
which has no particular foundation in nature, would cease again, were there not something that did, as it were,
hold it together, and keep the parts from scattering. Though therefore it be the mind that makes the collection, it is
the name which is as it were the knot that ties them fast together. What a vast variety of different ideas does the
word triumphus hold together, and deliver to us as one species! Had this name been never made, or quite lost, we
might, no doubt, have had descriptions of what passed in that solemnity: but yet, I think, that which holds those
different parts together, in the unity of one complex idea, is that very word annexed to it; without which the
several parts of that would no more be thought to make one thing than any other show, which having never been
made but once, had never been united into one complex idea, under one denomination. How much, therefore, in
mixed modes, the unity necessary to any essence depends on the mind; and how much the continuation and fixing
of that unity depends on the name in common use annexed to it, I leave to be considered by those who look upon
essences and species as real established things in nature.
