immediately perceive the
absurdity of that proposition; in the same manner as one particular idea
may serve us in reasoning concerning other ideas, however different from
it in several circumstances.

Fourthly, As the individuals are collected together, said placed under
a general term with a view to that resemblance, which they bear to each
other, this relation must facilitate their entrance in the imagination,
and make them be suggested more readily upon occasion. And indeed if
we consider the common progress of the thought, either in reflection
or conversation, we shall find great reason to be satisfyed in this
particular. Nothing is more admirable, than the readiness, with which
the imagination suggests its ideas, and presents them at the very
instant, in which they become necessary or useful. The fancy runs from
one end of the universe to the other in collecting those ideas, which
belong to any subject. One would think the whole intellectual world of
ideas was at once subjected to our view, and that we did nothing but
pick out such as were most proper for our purpose. There may not,
however, be any present, beside those very ideas, that are thus
collected by a kind of magical faculty in the soul, which, though it be
always most perfect in the greatest geniuses, and is properly what we
call a genius, is however inexplicable by the utmost efforts of human
understanding.

Perhaps these four reflections may help to remove an difficulties to
the hypothesis I have proposed concerning abstract ideas, so contrary to
that, which has hitherto prevailed in philosophy, But, to tell the truth
I place my chief confidence in what I have already proved concerning
the impossibility of general ideas, according to the common method of
explaining them. We must certainly seek some new system on this head,
and there plainly is none beside what I have proposed. If ideas be
particular in their nature, and at the same time finite in their number,
it is only by custom they can become general in their representation,
and contain an infinite number of other ideas under them.

Before I leave this subject I shall employ the same principles to
explain that distinction of reason, which is so much talked of, and is
so little understood, in the schools. Of this kind is the distinction
betwixt figure and the body figured; motion and the body moved. The
difficulty of explaining this distinction arises from the principle
above explained, that all