522 A BRIEF SCHERBE OF ONTOLOGY. Order is five-fold. There is the order of time, of nature, of place, of dignity, and of knowledge. A man is before his son in tinte; the sun before its light in nature; the horses before the cart in place ; a king before a duke in dignity; and a line must be known before an angle. Things are said to be together in (line, either which begin at the same time, as the sun and light, fire and heat; or which in some part of their being, life or time are co- existent with each other; as Plato and Aristotle may be called contemporaries, though the master was much elder than the scholar. CHAP. XV.-Of mental Relations, viz. abstract Notions, Signs, Words, Terms of Art, Sic. THUS we have finished all the real relations and proceed to those that are mental. Mental relations are such as belongnot to beings as stand- ing in any real relation to each other, but they are made merely by our minds, and arise only from our manner of conceiving things, or from modes which our minds affix to them. They are known by this mark, viz. that if there were no intelligent beings to conceive of them, these mental relations could never have been. The chief of this kind are pure abstracted notions, signs, words, terms of art, and external denominations. Pure abstract notions are what the schools call second no- tions, second intentions, or in latin entia rationis, i. e. mere creatures of the mind. Yet it is not every sort or degree of abstraction that pro- perly make a mental relation: When we first abstract the idea of any special nature from its individual circumstances, v. c. the common idea of a man or humanity from the particular ideas that distinguish Peter and Paul, this is not a mere mental affec- tion or relation, though it is an abstract idea, for it is part of the real and absolute idea of Peter or Paul, because all things con- tained in the general idea of a man have a real being in nature; though not really separate from some individual. But when I abstract this common idea of humanity yet fur- ther in my mind by considering it as a special nature or notion that agrees to several individuals, and under this precise consi- deration I call it a species; this is a mental relation: Or in like manner when I call the abstract idea of animal a genus; these and the like are 'more properly termed pure abstracted notions,' or (if I may use the word) they are second notions, because they are made by a second abstraction, and so they are at least one remove farther distant from real beings. The idea of predica- ments or predicables in logic are of thesame kind ; and I think we may rank the ideas of noun and verb, case and declensionin grammar minder the saine class.
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