13. In our inquiries about substances, we must consider ideas, and not confine our thoughts to names or species
supposed set out by names.
This, if we rightly consider, and confine not our thoughts and abstract ideas to names,
as if there were, or could be no other sorts of things than what known names had already determined, and, as it
were, set out, we should think of things with greater freedom and less confusion than perhaps we do. It would
possibly be thought a bold paradox, if not a very dangerous falsehood, if I should say that some changelings, who
have lived forty years together, without any appearance of reason, are something between a man and a beast:
which prejudice is founded upon nothing else but a false supposition, that these two names, man and beast, stand
for distinct species so set out by real essences, that there can come no other species between them: whereas if we
will abstract from those names, and the supposition of such specific essences made by nature, wherein all things
of the same denominations did exactly and equally partake; if we would not fancy that there were a certain
number of these essences, wherein all things, as in moulds, were cast and formed; we should find that the idea of
the shape, motion, and life of a man without reason, is as much a distinct idea, and makes as much a distinct sort
of things from man and beast, as the idea of the shape of an ass with reason would be different from either that of
man or beast, and be a species of an animal between, or distinct from both.
