15. Why their names are usually got before their ideas.
This also may show us the reason why for the most part
the names of fixed modes are got before the ideas they stand for are perfectly known. Because there being no
species of these ordinarily taken notice of but what have names, and those species, or rather their essences, being
abstract complex ideas, made arbitrarily by the mind, it is convenient, if not necessary, to know the names, before
one endeavour to frame these complex ideas: unless a man will fill his head with a company of abstract complex
ideas, which, others having no names for, he has nothing to do with, but to lay by and forget again. I confess that,
in the beginning of languages, it was necessary to have the idea before one gave it the name: and so it is still,
where, making a new complex idea, one also, by giving it a new name, makes a new word. But this concerns not
languages made, which have generally pretty well provided for ideas which men have frequent occasion to have
and communicate; and in such, I ask whether it be not the ordinary method, that children learn the names of mixed
modes before they have their ideas? What one of a thousand ever frames the abstract ideas of glory and ambition,
before he has heard the names of them? In simple ideas and substances I grant it is otherwise, which, being such
ideas as have a real existence and union in nature, the ideas and names are got one before the other, as it happens.
