46. Instances of a species of substance named Zahab.
Let us now also consider, after the same manner, the names
of substances in their first application. One of Adam's children, roving in the mountains, lights on a glittering
substance which pleases his eye. Home he carries it to Adam, who, upon consideration of it, finds it to be hard, to
have a bright yellow colour, and an exceeding great weight. These perhaps, at first, are all the qualities he takes
notice of in it; and abstracting this complex idea, consisting of a substance having that peculiar bright yellowness,
and a weight very great in proportion to its bulk, he gives the name zahab, to denominate and mark all substances
that have these sensible qualities in them. It is evident now, that, in this case, Adam acts quite differently from
what he did before, in forming those ideas of mixed modes to which he gave the names kinneah and niouph. For
there he put ideas together only by his own imagination, not taken from the existence of anything; and to them he
gave names to denominate all things that should happen to agree to those his abstract ideas, without considering
whether any such thing did exist or not; the standard there was of his own making. But in the forming his idea of
this new substance, he takes the quite contrary course; here he has a standard made by nature; and therefore, being
to represent that to himself, by the idea he has of it, even when it is absent, he puts in no simple idea into his
complex one, but what he has the perception of from the thing itself. He takes care that his idea be conformable to
this archetype, and intends the name should stand for an idea so conformable.
