33. How when they stand for modes and relations.
In Modes and Relations generally, we are liable only to the
four first of these inconveniences; viz., 1. I may have in my memory the names of modes, as gratitude or charity,
and yet not have any precise ideas annexed in my thoughts to those names. 2. I may have ideas, and not know the
names that belong to them: v.g. I may have the idea of a man's drinking till his colour and humour be altered, till
his tongue trips, and his eyes look red, and his feet fail him; and yet not know that it is to be called drunkenness.
3. I may have the ideas of virtues or vices, and names also, but apply them amiss: v.g. when I apply the name
frugality to that idea which others call and signify by this sound, covetousness. 4. I may use any of those names
with inconstancy. 5. But, in modes and relations, I cannot have ideas disagreeing to the existence of things: for
modes being complex ideas, made by the mind at pleasure, and relation being but by way of considering or
comparing two things together, and so also an idea of my own making, these ideas can scarce be found to disagree
with anything existing; since they are not in the mind as the copies of things regularly made by nature, nor as
properties inseparably flowing from the internal constitution or essence of any substance; but, as it were, patterns
lodged in my memory, with names annexed to them, to denominate actions and relations by, as they come to
exist. But the mistake is commonly in my giving a wrong name to my conceptions; and so using words in a
different sense from other people: I am not understood, but am thought to have wrong ideas of them, when I give
wrong names to them. Only if I put in my ideas of mixed modes or relations any inconsistent ideas together, I fill
my head also with chimeras; since such ideas, if well examined, cannot so much as exist in the mind, much less
any real being ever be denominated from them.
