HKB
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Often appears with: reason and the intellect · real essences useless · monsters and changelings · language, naming, and meaning · doubt, skepticism, and certainty · abstract ideas
Usually: argument (1) · censure (1)
“To conclude. This is that which in short I would say, viz. that all the great business of GENERA and SPECIES, and their ESSENCES, amounts to no more but this:--That men making abstract ideas, and settling them in their minds with names annexed to them, do thereby enable themselves to consider things, and discourse of them, as it were in bundles” John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 2 · insight
Locke argues that talk of real essences as species-distinguishers is useless, since imagined unknown constitutions cannot help knowledge compared with abstract ideas and general names.
19. Essences ingenerable and incorruptible. That such abstract ideas, with names to them, as we have been speaking of are essences, may further appear by what we are told concerning essences, viz. that they are all ingenerable and incorruptible. Which cannot be true of the real constitutions of things, which begin and perish with them. All things that exist, besides their Author, are all liable to change; especially…