7. Secondly, because they have no standards in nature.
Because the names of mixed modes for the most part want
standards in nature, whereby men may rectify and adjust their significations, therefore they are very various and
doubtful. They are assemblages of ideas put together at the pleasure of the mind, pursuing its own ends of
discourse, and suited to its own notions, whereby it designs not to copy anything really existing, but to
denominate and rank things as they come to agree with those archetypes or forms it has made. He that first
brought the word sham, or wheedle, or banter, in use, put together as he thought fit those ideas he made it stand
for; and as it is with any new names of modes that are now brought into any language, so it was with the old ones
when they were first made use of. Names, therefore, that stand for collections of ideas which the mind makes at
pleasure must needs be of doubtful signification, when such collections are nowhere to be found constantly united
in nature, nor any patterns to be shown whereby men may adjust them. What the word murder, or sacrilege, etc.,
signifies can never be known from things themselves: there be many of the parts of those complex ideas which are
not visible in the action itself; the intention of the mind, or the relation of holy things, which make a part of
murder or sacrilege, have no necessary connexion with the outward and visible action of him that commits either:
and the pulling the trigger of the gun with which the murder is committed, and is all the action that perhaps is
visible, has no natural connexion with those other ideas that make up the complex one named murder. They have
their union and combination only from the understanding which unites them under one name: but, uniting them
without any rule or pattern, it cannot be but that the signification of the name that stands for such voluntary
collections should be often various in the minds of different men, who have scarce any standing rule to regulate
themselves and their notions by, in such arbitrary ideas.
