consequence to that article—I do not see how your lordship's writing against the notion of ideas, as stated in my book, will at all hinder your opposers from employing them in doing mischief, as before.
However, be that as it will, so it is, that your lordship apprehends these new terms, these ideas, with which the world hath, of late, been so strangely amused, (though at last they come to be only common notions of things, as your lordship owns) may be of dangerous consequence to that article.
My lord, if any, in answer to your lordship's sermons, and in other pamphlets, wherein your lordship complains they have talked so much of ideas, have been troublesome to your lordship with that term, it is not strange that your lordship should be tired with that sound: but how natural soever it be to our weak constitutions to be offended with any sound wherewith an importunate din hath been made about our ears; yet, my lord, I know your lordship has a better opinion of the articles of our faith, than to think any of them can be overturned, or so much as shaken, with a breath, formed into any sound or term whatsoever.
Names are but the arbitrary marks of conceptions; and so they be sufficiently appropriated to them in their use, I know no other difference any of them have in particular, but as they are of easy or difficult pronunciation, and of a more or less pleasant sound; and what particular antipathies there may be in men to some of them, upon that account, is not easy to be foreseen. This I am sure, no term whatsoever in itself bears, one more than another, any opposition to truth of any kind; they are only propositions that do or can oppose the truth of any article or doctrine; and thus no term is privileged for being set in opposition to truth.
There is no word to be found, which may not be brought into a proposition, wherein the most sacred and most evident truths may be opposed; but that is not a fault in the term, but him that uses it. And therefore I cannot easily persuade myself (whatever your lordship hath said in the heat of your concern) that you have bestowed so much pains upon my book, because the word idea is so much used there. For though upon my saying, in my chapter about the existence of God, 'That I scarce used the word idea in that whole chapter, your lordship wishes, that I had done so quite through my book; yet I must rather look upon that as a compliment to me, wherein your lordship wished that my book had been all through suited to vulgar readers, not used to that and the like terms, than that your lordship has such an apprehension of the word idea; or that there is any such harm in the use of it, instead of the word notion (with which your lordship seems to take it to agree in signification), that your lordship would think it worth your while to spend any part of your valuable time and thoughts about my book, for having the word idea so often in it; for this would be to make your lordship to write only against an impropriety of speech. I own to your lordship, it is a great condescension in your lordship to have done it, if that word have such a share in what your lordship has writ against my book, as some expressions would persuade one; and I would, for the satisfaction of your lordship, change the term of idea for a better, if your lordship, or any one, could help me to it; for, that notion will not so well stand for every immediate object of the mind in thinking, as idea does, I have (as I guess) somewhere given a reason in my book, by showing that the term notion is more peculiarly appropriated to a certain sort of those objects, which I call mixed modes: and, I think, it would not sound altogether so well, to say, the notion of red, and the notion of a horse; as the idea of red, and the idea of a horse. But if any one thinks it will, I contend not; for I have no fondness for, nor an antipathy to, any particular articulate sounds; nor do I think there is any spell or fascination in any of them.
