Note 279 — Chapter XX · (continued 3)

“An universal,” he says in his Logic, “is not a name of many things collectively, but of each taken separately (sigillatim sumptorum). Man is not the name of the human species, in general, but of each single man, Peter, John and the rest, separately. Therefore, this universal name is not the name of any thing existing in nature, nor of any idea or phantasm formed in the mind, but always of some word or name. Thus, when an animal, or a stone, or a ghost (spectrum) or anything else is called universal, we are not to understand that any man or stone or anything else was, or is, or can be an universal, but only that these words animal, stone, and the like are universal names, that is, names common to many things, and the conceptions corresponding to them in the mind are the images and phantasms of single animals or other things. And therefore we do not need, in order to understand what is meant by an universal, any other faculty than that of imagination, by which we remember that such words have excited the conception in our minds sometimes of one particular thing, sometimes of another.” Cap. 2, § 9. Imagination and memory are used by Hobbes almost as synonyms.